Fabrice Lefèvre received a degree in electrical engineering from ENSEA and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from University Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne U), France, in 2000. He was appointed an Assistant Professor position at Orsay University, now Paris-Saclay, in 2001 where he worked in the Spoken Language Processing Group at LIMSI-CNRS.
He joined the University of Avignon in 2005, and he is now Professor and head of the Vocal Interactions Group at LIA since 2010. He was an academic visitor in the Engineering Department of Cambridge University in 2009.
His primary research activity is natural language processing (automatic speech recognition and generation, speech understanding, stochastic machine translation, spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interface), his work pioneered recourse to ML-based approaches for semantic analysis of speech. He is the author/co-author of +100 peer-reviewed papers for journals and conferences. He was involved in several European and US projects (CORETEX, AMITIES, EARS, LUNA and Classic). He participated in several international (NIST) and French (AUPELF, Technolangue) spoken language recognition and understanding system evaluation campaigns.
F. Lefèvre has led several projects (ANR muDialBot, Portmedia, OptimNLP or site/workpackage scientific leader for FP6 CORETEX, FP7 LUNA, ANR MaRDi...). He is former head of CERI (Computer Science Center of Avignon University, +100 personnel staff, +500 students), member of administrative board of Avignon Univ. He (co-)organised several manifestations and was on the program committee of many events (Interspeech, SLT, ASRU, SigDial, IWSDS, JEP, TALN...).
F. Lefèvre is member of the International Speech Communication Association, member of IEEE, serves on the IEEE signal processing society, speech and language processing technical committee (SLTC) as an elected member (2012–16) and was cofounder of the French Spoken Communication Association (AFCP). He also serves in Avignon University Administration Board. He was responsible of South Pole of the Institut Cognition (ANR Tremplin Carnot, 2016-19) and member of its operating board. He is now participating in the Direction Committee of ILCB (Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain). In Sept 2021 he was appointed University adviser for scientific integrity.