In the early 1960s, before the term "natural language processing" existed, Belgian linguist Jacques Blois built one of Europe's first working systems for the automatic morphological analysis of French. Six decades later, that same rigor — roots, affixes, explainable structure — underpins Suzon, a hybrid AI system for modern language models. This archive traces the line between the two.
Suzon is a hybrid AI system designed to bring explainability, bias-free processing, and multilingual precision to modern language models. It cleans and structures input before an LLM sees it, and verifies output afterward — a linguistic immune system, in effect, sitting on either side of the model.
Its method isn't new. It's a direct descendant of the morphological approach Jacques Blois developed in the 1960s: decompose a word into roots and affixes, resolve it against a structured system, and only then let the machine act on it. The five rooms below document where that method came from.
In 1961, a small team at the Université libre de Bruxelles began work on DICAUTOM (Dictionnaire Automatique) — a system designed to automate dictionary lookup for human translators, rather than replace them outright.
Blois joined this effort with a specific problem to solve: French is a heavily inflected language, and a translator's dictionary needs to recognize a word however it appears — conjugated, pluralized, or combined with prefixes and suffixes — and trace it back to a single entry.
Source: Université libre de Bruxelles, activity report of the Groupe de Linguistique Automatique, 1963. Read the report →
Blois and E. Morlet published Morphologie du français pour la traduction automatique — a method for decomposing French words into roots and affixes, so a machine could reduce any inflected form to a single dictionary headword before looking it up.
It's a modest-sounding idea that solves a real problem: without it, a dictionary lookup system would need a separate entry for every conjugated, pluralized, or derived form of every word — an impossible task at the scale of a living language.
Source: J. Blois & E. Morlet, Morphologie du français pour la traduction automatique, Publications Office of the European Union, 1963. Read the publication →
Two decades later, at the Institut supérieur de traducteurs et interprètes (ISTI), Blois moved from morphological theory to applied databases. Working on IBM's STAIRS system, he built two tools: CLEF, a lookup database for translated technical terms, and LEXI, a bibliographic and lexical database built from student research on neologisms — with automatic lemmatization, so a single query could retrieve every inflected or compound form of a term.
This terminal is a stylistic homage to the STAIRS interface Blois described in his 1983
article — not a reproduction of its data. For the original search transcripts (query
display, query agent de dissuasion), see the source below.
Source: Jacques Blois, "Les banques de données de l'I.S.T.I.," Équivalences, vol. 14, no. 2–3, 1983, pp. 61–66. Read on Persée →
DICAUTOM is discussed as one of the direct forerunners of Eurodicautom, the European Commission's terminology database, launched in 1975. Eurodicautom was folded into IATE in 2007 — the terminology base still used by EU institutions today.
Source: Gwénaël Glâtre, "Le traducteur et l'ingénieur « Eurodicautom », années 1960," Encyclopédie d'histoire numérique de l'Europe, Sorbonne University. Read the entry →
Full bibliography of primary and secondary sources used throughout this exhibit.
Sixty years on, the method still holds. The Jacques Blois Research Institute maintains this archive; Suzon carries the work forward. Explore the potential of Suzon and help us shape the future of linguistic intelligence.