About

Hello!

I am a software developer specializing in NLP and modelling legal texts. I have 7 years of experience working across diverse industries such as mobile apps, autonomous agriculture, and point-of-sale software. Throughout my career, I have gained expertise in many areas of software development, including databases, back-end, front-end, DevOps, and project management. I am proficient in a wide range of technologies and programming languages.

I have a special interest in how software can be used to model and implement normative documents, such as laws, regulations, and software requirements. This has led to work in some key industries. In the cannabis industry I developed software that tracked the traceability of products to ensure that dispensaries stayed compliant with jurisdictional laws. I also worked alongside the government of Canada, developing policy analysis tools that measured the impact of changes to complex regulations. This type of work involves formalizing natural language requirements into a precise and unambiguous format so that they can be implemented in software.

This interest led me to pursue a Master’s degree at UOttawa, where I am completing a thesis that explores how normative documents like legal contracts can be formalized using NLP techniques. This resulted in the design and creation of a proof-of-concept application, as well as a paper publication at the IEEE Requirements Engineering conference 2023. I received numerous scholarships, including the Canada Graduate Scholarship. Throughout my education, I became well-versed in many NLP/ML tasks (classification, semantic role labelling, entity recognition) using both traditional techniques as well as more modern transformer-based technologies, and I received an A+ in all graduate courses. My thesis will be completed at the end of August 2023.

Now that I have completed my studies, I am looking to re-enter industry to apply my skills. My unique value is my extensive experience as a full-stack software developer combined with my up-to-date studies and experience in the fast-growing field of NLP and ML, with particular application to the legal domain.

This site highlights some of the projects I’ve enjoyed working on in the past, which I have grouped into categories (IoT, Web apps, and NLP/ML). Please reach out to me at reganmeloche [at] gmail [dot] com.