NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Babillage et diversification alimentaire : pratiques et influence de l'exposition aux textures sur le contrôle oro-moteur

During the first years of life, the child gradually moves from an exclusively milk diet to a family diet through a period of complementary feeding. It is also during this period that babbling and mastication appear. They are both associated with the emergence of mandibular rhythmic oscillations (MacNeilage, 1998). This common motor gesture and the co-occurrence of eating disorders and speech / language disorders suggest a link between the development of speech and eating activities. To date, only few studies described the characteristics of the early development of these two activities, and there are also very few that have tried to verify this link experimentally. This PhD project aims to meet these two goals. The first part of our work pursue the objective of describing the feeding behavior of young French children during complementary feeding period and to compare them with the recommendations of public health organizations (WHO, Inpes). A parental questionnaire entitled "Inventaire des Conduites Alimentaires" was created and allowed to examine the modalities of introduction of complementary foods, including those of textures, in a sample of 806 French typically developing children. The second part of our work aims to test the link between babbling and chewing in two studies. Using acoustic and video data we first examined longitudinally the developmental trajectories of syllabic and masticatory temporal patterns between 8 and 14 months in 4 Quebecers children. Afterwards, we analyzed the characteristics of these temporal patterns in 14 French 10 months old children according to the development of communicative gestures and the type of textures consumed. The results show an average age of food transition between 4 and 5 months and a sequential introduction of textures during dietary diversification. Moreover, the trajectories of the syllabic and masticatory patterns obtained suggest on the one hand an overall improvement of the oro-motor control between 10 and 12 months, and on the other hand that the syllabic temporal patterns would be influenced by the type of textures to which the child is regularly exposed. These observations thus give rise to arguments for the existence of a one-sided interdependence between speech and feeding activities at an early stage of development.

Keyphrases: mastication, textures, babbling, chewing, temporal patterns, complementary feeding period, textures
Estimation multi-robuste efficace en présence de données influentes

Item nonresponse is a common issue in surveys. Because unadjusted estimators may be biased in the presence of nonresponse, it is common practice to impute the missing values, leading to the creation of a completed data file, in order to reduce the nonresponse bias. Moreover, the commonly used estimators of population totals/means are very unstable in the presence of influential units. We develop an efficient version, in the presence of influential units, of multiply robust estimators, which are estimators obtained after a multiply robust imputation method. To do so, we define the conditional bias of a sample unit as its measure of influence. We will present the results of a simulation study to show the benefits of the proposed method in terms of bias and efficiency.

Keyphrases: Robustness, Multiply robust imputation, Conditional bias, Design-based inference, Influential units, Item nonresponse
Learning competitive ensemble of information-constrained primitives

We want to develop reinforcement learning algorithms that enable the learning agent to obtain a structured decomposition of its behavior. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning provides a mechanism for doing this by explicitly modularising the policy into two components --- a set of low-level sub-policies (or primitives) and a high-level master policy to coordinate between the primitives. While the primitives have to specialize to only a part of the state space, the master policy has to specialize to the entire state space as it decides when to activate which primitives. This introduces a        ``bottleneck'' where the success of the agent depends on the success of the master policy, thereby making it a single point of failure.  We propose to do away with this limitation by using a new mechanism where the sub-policies can decide for themselves in which part of the state they want to act. This decentralized decision making does away with the need for a parameterized master policy. We use this mechanism to train a policy that is composed of an ensemble of primitives but one that does not require a master policy to choose between the primitives. We experimentally demonstrate that this policy architecture improves over both flat and hierarchical policies in the terms of generalization. This work is under review at the NeurIPS 2019 Conference as a paper titled Learning Competitive Ensemble of Information-Constrained Primitives.  In Chapter One, I provide a background to Reinforcement Learning, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Information Bottleneck, Compositionality, and Neural Module Networks and discuss how the proposed work in Chapter Two relates to these ideas. Chapter Two describes the idea of training an ensemble of primitives. I conclude the thesis by discussing some future research directions for the work described in Chapter Two.

Keyphrases: Reinforcement Learning, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Information Bottleneck, Compositionality, Modular network
Personality extraction through LinkedIn

Personality extraction through social networks is a field that only recently started to capture the attention of researchers. The task consists in, starting with a corpus of user profiles on a particular social network, classifying their personalities correctly, according to a specific personality model as described in psychology. In this master thesis, three innovations to the domain are presented. Firstly, the collection of a corpus of LinkedIn users. Secondly, the extraction of the personality according to two personality models, DiSC and MBTI, the extraction with DiSC having never been done before. Lastly, the idea of going from one personality model to the other is explored, thus creating the possibility of having the results on two personality models with only one personality test.

Keyphrases: MBTI, DiSC, LinkedIn, Personality Extraction, Social Network, Author Profiling
Étude de l’effet d’un mimétique de l’apoA-I sur la dysfonction diastolique du ventricule gauche

Left ventricular diastolic dysfunction (LVDD), a precursor form of heart failure, is a condition that affects compliance and relaxation of the myocardium. Unlike systolic heart failure, there is no clinically approved treatment yet for LVDD. Complexity of the pathways behind this disease as well as the small number of adequate animal models reflecting its physiopathology are the main causes of this lack of treatment. In our laboratory, we previously showed that mimetic of apolipoprotein A-I (apoA-I), a major component of high-density lipoproteins (HDL), improves LVDD in a rabbit model of aortic valve stenosis (AVS). AVS is one of the main risk factors which can cause LVDD. The first objective of this thesis is to develop a valid animal model of LVDD without AVS. The second objective is to test the potential effects of apoA-I on this pathology and to elucidate the mechanisms of action behind these effects. To do so, we used two different models of rabbits. The first, was based on the exposure of rabbits to a high-cholesterol diet for an average period of 16 weeks (without excess of vitamin D2 to prevent development of AVS). The second, is a surgical model of transaortic constriction (TAC). With this model, rabbits develop LVDD within 12 weeks after surgery, without involvement of AVS. Once LVDD was established, rabbits were treated with 3 injections of 25 mg/kg of apoA-I mimetic peptide weekly for 4 consecutive weeks. Echocardiography sessions were performed throughout the study to assess the stage of the disease at different time points. Molecular effects of the treatment were evaluated by qPCR and by immunohistochemistry experiments. In our two rabbit models, LVDD was established without the presence of AVS. At the end of the treatment period, our drug did not significantly improve diastolic dysfunction in rabbits. Only a few positive effects of treatment involved in the anti-inflammatory pathway have been noticed. In conclusion, these results allowed us to confirm that the positive effects of apoA-I mimetic peptide that we have previously reported on LVDD in another study were mediated by the improvement of AVS but not by a direct effect on the myocardium.

Keyphrases: apoA-I, Diastolic  Dysfunction, Aortic valve stenosis, Animal model
Empirical study and multi-task learning exploration for neural sequence labeling models

Neural-based models have attracted considerable attention for automatic sequence labeling. Compared to the traditional models, neural-based models achieve better performance with less or no hand-craft feature engineering. Due to the sensitivity of the experimental setting, it is always hard to reproduce and compare the effectiveness of different models in an identical condition. Moreover, even these models can be applied on different sequence labeling tasks, like Name Entity Recognition (NER), Text Chunking, and Part of Speech tagging (POS), previous works fail to give better performance under a multi-task learning (MTL) setting than when learning each task individually.  We study the main factors affecting the performance of neural sequence labeling systems, by re-implementing sequence labeling models based on different neural architectures, which include most of the state-of-the-art methods, and run a systematic model comparison on three benchmarks (NER, Chunking, and POS tagging). Through the empirical comparison and analysis, we get several practical conclusions in such sequence labeling tasks.  Then we attempt to build a system that can learn three sequential tagging tasks at the same time improve the accuracy of each task. We propose a Shared Cell Long-Short Term Memory network (SC-LSTM) for multi-task sequence labeling and compare our model with two shared-encoder sequential tagging models.   By holding a set of shared parameters, the cell state of our SC-LSTM can get supervision from three tasks, while our SC-LSTM model has independent task-specific components to learn private information of each task.   Experimental results on three benchmark sequence labeling datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our SC-LSTM for NER, text chunking, and POS tagging tasks.

Keyphrases: Deep learning, Sequence labeling, Neural network
Étude de la fusion humaine NUP98-HOXA9 chez la drosophile

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a heterogenous hematopoietic disorder characterized by the accumulation of immature myeloid progenitors or myeloblasts in the blood and bone marrow. Several genetic abnormalities can lead to the disease. One of these corresponds to the NUP98-HOXA9 (NA9) translocation that fuses sequences encoding the N-terminal portion of NUP98 to those encoding the DNA-binding domain of HOXA9. It is a rare translocation associated with poor prognosis, but represents a prototypical case used to study NUP98-HOX chromosomal rearrangements. Despite numerous studies, the molecular mechanisms underlying NA9 leukemogenic activity remain unclear. This thesis seeks to shed light on NA9’s mechanism of action using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism.  The first chapter introduces, in a first section, hematopoiesis and provides actual knowledge on NA9 translocation. In a second section, Drosophila hematopoiesis as well as compound eye development and its use for genetic screening strategy are addressed. Next chapters are devoted to our research results. A first article shows phenotype characterization induced by expression of the human NA9 oncoprotein in the Drosophila larval hematopoietic system. NA9 markedly enhanced cell proliferation and tissue growth, but did not alter cell fate specification. Reminiscent to NA9 activity in mammals, NA9 strongly collaborates with the MEIS homolog Hth. Moreover, genetic characterization of NA9-induced phenotype suggested interference with Pvr (Flt1-4 RTK homolog) signalling, which is similar to functional interaction observed in mammals between Flt3 and NUP98-HOX fusions in leukemia. Finally, NA9 expression was also found to induce non-cell autonomous affects, raising the possibility that its leukemogenic activity relies on this property. A second manuscript demonstrates the specificity of a NA9-induced phenotype in fly eye and reports a genetic screen to identify novel NA9 functional partners. A total of 29 loci have been isolated and of which, 16 have now been linked to a specific gene. Three of these had previously been shown to contribute to NA9 activity (Rae1, emb, hth). Finally, we focused on the chromatin remodelling factor E(Pc).     Using Drosophila, this study has uncovered several novel functional aspects linked to NA9 activity. In the long term, upon demonstrating their relevance to NA9-mediated AML onset, some of the new players identified here could pave the way to develop targeted therapeutic strategies to improve overall patient survival.

Keyphrases: Fusion NUP98-HOXA9, Drosophila melanogaster, Pvr, Rae1, Emb, Hth, E(Pc), NUP98-HOXA9 fusion, acute myeloid leukemia (AML), Drosophila melanogaster, hematopoiesis, modifier screen, compound eye, Pvr, Rae1, Emb, Hth, E(Pc)
Dynamiques hydrologiques d’un petit bassin versant arctique, rivière Niaqunguk, Iqaluit, Nunavut

Despite recent advances in the hydrological knowledge of permafrost regions, precise predictions or modelling of hydrological dynamics in Arctic watersheds remains difficult. In this master thesis a combination of field measurements, chemistry and statistical analysis were conducted at the hillslope scale and at watershed scale within the Niaqunguk River catchment, to improve our understanding of the processes controlling the water delivery to rivers in permafrost landscape. The first study show that hillslope drainage dynamics were intrinsically linked to permafrost active layer thawing patterns. The microtopography of the surficial organic layer has a great influence on the distribution across the hillslope, by first enhancing the accumulation of water in surficial depressions, which in return enhance localized thaw and the accumulation of water in subsurface depressions. The second study conducted at the watershed scale allowed to delineated, based on the particularities of the water chemistry along the river network, four distinct periods, corresponding respectively to early snowmelt, snowmelt recession, baseflow and summer rainfall events. Since dominant hydrological processes within the watershed changed from one period to another, this period division is relevant the understand the behaviour of the river system. The primary processes associated with each of the four periods were: snowmelt contributions, the distinction between late lying snowpack melt and lake contributions, subsurface flows through mineral deposits and surface flows through the organic layer. Fundamental hydrological knowledge generated in this research will greatly help to improve our ability to predict the response of Arctic hydrological systems to climate changes, but is also indispensable for a sustainable management of a future exploitation of the Niaqunguk River as a potable water for the City of Iqaluit.

Keyphrases: hydrologie, Arctic, hydrology, active layer, subsurface flows, lakes, surface flows
Inégalités, pauvreté et soutenabilité des ressources naturelles dans l’Ouest de la Côte d’Ivoire

In this article, we analyze inequalities of rights and access to natural resources in forest and land sustainable management in reference to the context of colonial and post-colonial policy. The article shows that in western Ivorian forest, degraded forest and land resources is inherent in socio-economic inequalities that underpin poverty of local populations, especially regarding inequalities of rights and access.

Keyphrases: Philosophy, Ethics, Economics, Poverty, Inequalities, Sustainable management, Natural resources
Fictions, critiques et théories littéraires dans « La Vie en rose » (1980-1987) : entre écriture féminine et conscience féministe

This thesis focuses on ''La Vie en rose'' (1980-1987), a self-financed and self-managed feminist magazine that emerged as a "specialist" of women's movements in the 1980s. Popular for its abrasive humor, its thematic files and its critical point of view on the news, the magazine is unavoidable to understand the discourse held by the feminists during this period. Since its beginning year, ''La Vie en Rose'' publishes literature reviews that analyze women's books, as well as a "literature" section, in which feature articles about the representations of women in popular literature, literary genres and the act of reading. In addition, there are more than sixty short stories written by women, as well as numerous interviews in which women writers are asked to reflect on their writings according to their gender position.  This sum of texts from both writers and journalists forms a micro-narrative in a bigger cultural discourse on feminine writing in Quebec’s specific context, according to the concepts established by Micheline Cambron in ''Une société, un récit'' (1989). The object of this work lies in the relationship between the corpus in a widely distributed publication and the feminist theories that appear in many works at the same time, as reported by Isabelle Boisclair and Lori Saint-Martin in their respective books. The hypothesis that will guide the analyzes is as follows: if the texts (stories, articles and interviews) published in ''La Vie en rose'' are obviously imbued with feminist theories of the time, a gradual removal of militant themes is put in place, which is a sign of the emergence of a new generation of feminist writers.  Thus, it seems pertinent to ask the following questions: how do selected fictions in ''La Vie en rose'' put to the test feminist ideas developed in theoretical works contemporary to the period of publication of the journal? What notions are there? In what way (s) is the transition from militant prose to metafeminist prose? What does this paradigm shift mean in relation to the cultural discourse on women's writing? In order to examine how this revival dialogues with a shared feminist narrative, a selection of feminist theoretical works, published between 1970 and 1990 (Nicole Brossard, France Theoret, Louise Dupré, Suzanne Lamy, etc.), will be confronted with the selected contents in ''La Vie en rose''. The method used for the analysis of the texts will be inspired by sociocritique and the analysis of the discourse, more particularly the notions of cultural discourse and common narrative, but also concepts resulting from the literary and feminist theories, such as the women-writings.

Keyphrases: XXIe siècle québécois, Feminist studies, Women's literature, women's writings, metafeminism, History of the pressand Quebec's publications, Cultural discourse, 1980s, 21st century Quebec, La Vie en rose
Les représentations des variétés régionales de l'allemand chez les assistants d'allemand au Québec

Western second-language assistant exchange programs, as we know them today, were put in place during the 20th century to promote national language and culture. In the light of recent developments in second language acquisition, they became an opportunity for learners to have direct contact with culture and the target language in a natural communication context. Among other things, language instructors have a duty to promote their genuine way of life to students. The assistant, however, remains primarily an individual with his own cultural and linguistic identity. In this sense, his authenticity lies in the diversity it brings with him in class. However, second-language educational institutions do not traditionally give much space to linguistic varieties or regional cultures in their curricula. In this context, there may be conflicts between the linguistic and cultural identity of the individual and the environment and the values of the second language acquisition class. In order to explore this issue, this study conducted semi-directed interviews with a cohort of German assistants in Quebec. More specifically, we observed their linguistic representations of regional varieties of German and the place given to them in their work in the classroom. The presence and symbolic importance of traditional dialects in Germany as well as the distinctive sociolinguistic context of Quebec allow an interesting angle on the question of the integration of linguistic varieties into second language acquisition.

Keyphrases: ALS, language assistants, german as a second language, SLA, second language acquisition, regional varieties, dialects, linguistic representations, language attitudes
Trajectoire conjugale des parents et rendement et motivation scolaires d’une cohorte d’enfants québécois en 6e année du primaire

From the sample of children born in Quebec between 1997 and 1998 who are part of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (QLSCD), we evaluate the academic performance and motivation of children at the end of primary school (average age: 12 years). The explanatory variables are the type of conjugal union of the parents at the birth of the child, their separation, and the sex of the child (main and interactive effects). The selected indicators correspond to mandatory ministerial examinations at the end of primary school, teacher’s evaluations, and the children's own statements.   Results indicate that when socio-economic and demographic variables as well as cognitive stimulation of the child are considered, there are few significant differences in the performance and academic motivation of children depending on the type of parental union at birth. Some positive effects were observed in cases of children whose parents were living in common-law unions at the time of birth and remained together at the time of the interview. In the occurrence of a parental separation, boys of parents who were married at the time of birth are more affected than boys or girls of parents who were in common-law unions at the time of the child’s birth. These results correspond to differential effects according to the interactions between the sex of the child, the type of conjugal union, and the occurrence of a separation.

Keyphrases: Cohabitation, Mariage, Common-law union, Cohabitation, Marriage, Separation, Child, Family structure, Academic performance, Academic motivation, Well-being, Quebec