NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Habermas et Koselleck : éléments d’un dialogue sur la genèse de la modernité

This research aims to circumscribe the epistemological foundations of modernity. It does so by an analysis of the crisis of modernity. To be more precise, we explore a dialogue between Reinhart Koselleck and Jürgen Habermas. The intent of this conversation is to show a common understanding of the epochal moment of modernity. That is, the theoretical boundaries in which the foundational moment of modernity was, and still is, theorized. To reveal this agreement, we analyze the concept of Neue Zeit in its relation to premodern history. In doing so, we show that both thinkers recognise the importance of a new time, understood as an open future. Moreover, both thinkers differ as to the role and position of the Neue Zeit in the foundation of modernity. To reveal this disagreement, we present the concept of aesthetical modernity. In doing so, our research shows that as Koselleck sees temporality as a driving historical force, Habermas disagrees and sees it rather as a result of a historical rationalisation process. Furthermore, our research reveals a substantial disagreement as to the reasons underlying this dialogue. Notably, we claim that the common ground that links both thinkers in their understanding of premodern history is descriptive, rather than theoretical. That is, it refers to the empirical content of history, and not to it’s underlying causes. With that claim in hand, we offer to explain why both thinkers agree on their understanding of premodern history, but not on modern history itself.

Keyphrases: Habermas, Koselleck, Neue Zeit, Lebenswell, Philosophy, Crisis of modernity, Theory of periodization, Philosophy of history, Epistemology of history
Le jeu de policiers-voleur sur différentes classes de graphes

This thesis studies the game of cops and robbers and consists of three articles, each considering a specific class of graphs. In the first chapter, notation and basic definitions of graph theory are introduced. Al- though each article has an introduction citing the relevant concepts and results, the first chapter of this thesis also contains a general introduction to the game of cops and robbers and presents some of its major results. The second chapter contains the paper written with Seyyed Aliasghar Hosseini and Peter Bradshaw on the game of cops and robbers on abelian Cayley graphs. We improve the upper bound on the cop number of these graphs by refining the methods used previously by Hamidoune, Frankl and Bradshaw. The third chapter presents the paper concerning the cop number of 2K2-free graphs. More precisely, it is proved that 2 cops can always catch the robber on these graphs, proving a conjecture of Sivaraman and Testa. Finally, the fourth chapter is the paper written with Samuel Yvon which deals with graphs of cop number 4. We show that such graphs have at least 19 vertices. In other words, 3 cops can always catch the robber on any graph with at most 18 vertices, which answers in the negative a question by Andreae from 1986. An important part of the proof is by computer; this thesis thus has an appendix containing the code used.

Keyphrases: Cop number, Graph theory, Combinatorics, Game of cops and robbers, Cayley graphs, 2K2-free graphs, Minimum 4-cop-win graphs
Efficacité de l’algorithme EM en ligne pour des modèles statistiques complexes dans le contexte des données massives

The EM algorithm Dempster et al. (1977) yields a sequence of estimators that converges to the maximum likelihood estimator for missing data models whose maximum likelihood estimator is not directly tractable. The EM algorithm is remarkable given its numerous applications in statistical learning. However, it may suffer from its computational cost. Cappé and Moulines (2009) proposed an online version of the algorithm in models whose likelihood belongs to the exponential family that provides an upgrade in computational efficiency in large data sets. However, the conditional expected value of the sufficient statistic is often intractable for complex models and/or when the missing data is of a high dimension. In those cases, it is replaced by an estimator. Many questions then arise naturally: do the convergence results pertaining to the initial estimator hold when the expected value is substituted by an estimator? In particular, does the asymptotic normality property remain in this case? How does the variance of the estimator of the expected value affect the asymptotic variance of the EM estimator? Are Monte-Carlo and MCMC estimators suitable in this situation? Could variance reduction tools such as control variates provide variance relief? These questions will be tackled by the means of examples containing latent data models. This master’s thesis’ main contributions are the presentation of a unified framework for stochastic approximation EM algorithms, an illustration of the impact that the estimation of the conditional expected value has on the variance and the introduction of online EM algorithms which reduce the additional variance stemming from the estimation of the conditional expected value.

Keyphrases: EM algorithm, Stochastic approximation, Variance reduction, Computational statistics, Online algorithm
Développements théoriques et empiriques des tests lisses d'ajustement des modèles ARMA vectoriels

When validating time series models, the distribution of the observations represents a potentially important assumption. In this Master's Thesis, the advocated approach uses smooth goodness-of-fit test statistics. This research provides theoretical and empirical developments of the smooth goodness of fit tests for vector autoregressive moving average models (VARMA). In previous work, Ducharme and Lafaye de Micheaux (2004) developed smooth goodness-of-fit tests designed for the residuals of univariate ARMA models. Later, Tagne Tatsinkou (2016) generalized the work within the framework of vector ARMA (VARMA) models, which prove to be potentially useful in real applications. Structured parameterizations, which are considerations specific to the multivariate case, are discussed.   The works of Tagne Tatsinkou (2016) are completed, according to theoretical angles, and additional simulation studies are also considered. The new smooth tests are based on families of orthogonal polynomials. In this study, special attention is given to Legendre's family and Hermite's family. The major theoretical contribution in this work is a complete proof that the test statistic is invariant to linear affine transformations when the Hermite family is adopted. The results of Tagne Tatsinkou (2016) represent an important first step, but they were incomplete with respect to the use of the model residuals.   The proposed tests are based on a family of densities under alternative hypotheses of order k. A data driven method to choose the maximal order, based on the results of Ledwina (1994), is discussed. In our simulation studies, the automatic selection is also implemented.  Our simulation studies include bivariate models and a trivariate model. In the level study, we can appreciate the good performance of the smooth tests. In the power study, several competitors were considered. We found that the smooth tests displayed interesting power properties when the data came from VARMA models with innovations in the class of contaminated normal distributions.

Keyphrases: Invariance, Smooth goodness-of-fit tests, VARMA models, Non-normality test, Hermite polynomials, Legendre polynomials, Automatic selection
Exploring the prosodic and syntactic aspects of Mandarin-English Code switching

Code-switching (CS) is one of the most common natural behaviors among bilinguals. Linguists have been exploring the constraints behind CS to explain this behaviour, and while syntactic constraints have been the focus for decades, prosodic constraints were only studied more in depth recently. As a less common language pair in CS research, studies on Mandarin-English CS are limited for both constraints. Thus, this study explores the prosodic constraints and syntactic patterns of this language pair with a natural CS database. Prosodically, this study applies the information-based approach and its fundamental unit, Intonation Unit (IU), to conduct the analysis. The result of 10.6% bilingual IU (BIU) proves to be reliable and offers solid evidence that bilinguals tend to code-switch at IU boundaries. This supports the pioneer work of Shenk (2006) from the unexplored Mandarin-English language pair. In addition to this, the study develops solutions to deal with the subjectivity problem and the database appropriateness problem in this approach to strengthen the validity of the results. Syntactically, this study investigates the syntactic patterns at switching points on the Mandarin-English language pair using data collected from a rarely investigated bilingual community. Based on the results, a syntactic pattern specific to this language pair was observed and this study suggests it disrupted the final results. This study conducts an analysis with the results of both the prosodic aspect and the syntactic aspect. When the interfering results are eliminated, a more solid outcome can be observed which provides greater support to the prosodic constraint argument.

Keyphrases: Code-switching, Mandarin-English, Intonation Unit, prosodic constraints, syntactic patterns
Un dictionnaire de régimes verbaux en mandarin

This work fits into the GenDR project, a multilingual deep realizer which models the semantics-syntax interface for natural language generation (NLG). In NLG, lexical resources are essential to transform non-linguistic data into natural language. To a certain extent, the lexical resources used determine the accuracy and flexibility of the sentences generated by a realizer. Due to the unpredictability of verbs’ syntactic behaviour and the central role that verbs play in an utterance, a lexical resource which describes the government patterns of verbs is key to generating the most precise and natural text possible. We aim to create a dictionary of verbs’ government patterns in Mandarin. This kind of lexical resource is still missing for NLG in Mandarin. Based on the Mandarin VerbNet database, we used Python to extract information about adpositions and to create our dictionary. This is a dynamic dictionary whose content can be parameterized according to the user’s needs.

Keyphrases: Mandarin, Natural language generation, Linguistic realization, Verbs, Government patterns
Quand le genre s'en mêle : stratégies de requêtes dans les dessins animés

Following many works about gender in sociolinguistics, this quantitative study proposes to study gender by focusing on the formulation of by male and female characters requests in cartoons from 2000-2010. Indeed, there is a good deal of research explaining the influence of cartoons in the socialization of children who are asked to acquire the codes of their society and learn to live with others. Thus, cartoons are able to present them socialization patterns, from those present in their daily life. This is why this dissertation will be particularly interested in query strategies between characters and will attempt to establish a link between the gender of the speaker characters but also with the implicit role of each speaker within the group. Group dynamics is a very important criterion in choosing the corpus for this study since we will try to understand how the characters organize themselves within their own social dynamics through their different query strategies. By focusing on cartoons that present varied social dynamics (predominantly female group, predominantly male and mixed), our goal is to highlight the dynamics specific to these respective groups, in order to illustrate their differences and their similarities. To do this, we propose to develop a synchronic and diachronic analysis of these cartoons broadcast over approximately the same period, in order to put our research in parallel with a progressive evolution of our society.

Keyphrases: Gender studies, Cartoons, Requests, Requests strategies, Socialization, Taxem of power
Recommandation conversationnelle : écoutez avant de parlez

In a world of globalization, where offers continues to grow, the ability to direct people to their specific need is essential. After being key differentiating factors for Netflix and Amazon, Recommender Systems in general are no where near a downfall. Still, one downside of the basic recommender systems is that they are mainly based on indirect feedback (our behaviour, mainly form the past) as opposed to explicit demand at a specific time. Recent development in machine learning brings us closer to the possibility for a user to express it’s specific needs in natural language and get a machine generated reply. This is what Conversational Recommendation is about. Conversational recommendation encapsulates several machine learning sub-tasks. In this work, we focus our study on methods for the task of item (in our case, movie) recommendation from conversation. To explore this setting, we use, adapt and extend state of the art transformer based neural language modeling techniques to the task of recommendation from dialogue. We study the performance of different methods using the ReDial dataset [24], a conversational- recommendation dataset for movies. We also make use of a knowledge base of movies and measure their ability to improve performance for cold-start users, items, and/or both. This master thesis is divided as follows. First, we review all the basics concepts and the previous work necessary to to this lecture. When then dive deep into the specifics our data management, the different models we tested, the set-up of our experiments and the results we got. Follows the original a paper we submitted at RecSys 2020 Conference. Note that their is a minor inconsistency since throughout the thesis, we use v to represent items but in the paper, we used i. Overall, we find that pre-trained transformer models outperform baselines even if the baselines have access to the user preferences manually extracted from their utterances.

Keyphrases: Recommendation, Dialogue Systems, Transformers
Modeling functional brain activity of human working memory using deep recurrent neural networks

In cognitive systems, the role of working memory is crucial for visual reasoning and decision making. Tremendous progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms of the human/animal working memory, as well as in formulating different frameworks of memory augmented artificial neural networks.  The overall objective of our project is to train artificial neural network models that are capable of consolidating memory over a short period of time to solve a memory task and relate them to the brain activity of humans who solved the same task. The project is of interdisciplinary nature in trying to bridge aspects of Artificial Intelligence (deep learning) and Neuroscience. The cognitive task used is the N-back task, a very popular one in Cognitive Neuroscience in which the subjects are presented with a sequence of images, each of which needs to be identified as to whether it was already seen or not. The functional imaging (fMRI) dataset used has been collected as a part of the Courtois Neurmod Project.  We study multiple variants of recurrent neural network models that learn to remember input images across timesteps. These trained neural networks optimized for the memory task are ultimately used to generate feature representations for the stimuli images seen by the human subjects during their recordings while solving the task. The representations derived from these neural networks are then to create an encoding model to predict the fMRI BOLD activity of the subjects. We then understand the relationship between the neural network model and brain activity by analyzing this predictive ability of the model in different areas of the brain that are involved in working memory.  This work presents a way of using artificial neural networks to model the behavior and information processing of the working memory of the brain and to use brain imaging data captured from human subjects during the N-back task to potentially understand some memory mechanisms of the brain in relation to these artificial neural network models.

Keyphrases: long-short term memory networks (LSTM), working memory, fMRI, encoding model, representational similarity
Towards deep unsupervised inverse graphics

A long standing goal of computer vision is to infer the underlying 3D content in a scene from a single photograph, a task known as inverse graphics. Machine learning has, in recent years, enabled many approaches to make great progress towards solving this problem. However, most approaches rely on 3D supervision data which is expensive and sometimes impossible to obtain and therefore limits the learning capabilities of such work. In this work, we explore the deep unsupervised inverse graphics training pipeline and propose two methods based on distinct 3D representations and associated differentiable rendering algorithms: namely surfels and a novel Voronoi-based representation. In the first method based on surfels, we show that, while effective at maintaining view-consistency, producing view-dependent surfels using a learned depth map results in ambiguities as the mapping between depth map and rendering is non-bijective. In our second method, we introduce a novel 3D representation based on Voronoi diagrams which models objects/scenes both explicitly and implicitly simultaneously, thereby combining the benefits of both. We show how this representation can be used in both a supervised and unsupervised context and discuss its advantages compared to traditional 3D representations.

Keyphrases: Inverse graphics, Computer vision, Unsupervised learning, Differentiable rendering, 3D modeling, Generative neural networks, Computer graphics, Deep learning, Machine learning
Introduction à la reconstruction 3D par lumière structurée

This thesis focuses on active 3D reconstruction with structured light and is intended to be an introduction through an overview of the field.  It is focused on understanding the different aspects of a 3D scanner, from the acquisition of the material to the final mesh reconstruction. The most common technical difficulties that arise in the context of low-cost 3D scanning are addressed, to give a general idea of the potential technical problems that may occur when using a DIY 3D scanner built from scratch. To help assess the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm of the current state of the art in structured light, a review of the different strategies is also proposed.  The study of this domain led to the contribution of a paper, presented here in its entirety in chapter 6. This paper describes an improvement of an existing algorithm, both in terms of performance and precision, and was published in the International Virtual Conference on 3D Vision in November 2020.

Keyphrases: Active reconstruction, Subpixel, Depth-discontinuities
Extending domain-specific modeling editors with multi-touch interactions

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a software engineering methodology that enables engineers to define conceptual models for a specific domain. Modeling is supported by modeling language workbenches, acting as editor to create and manipulate domain-specific models. However, the current state of practice of these modeling editors offers very limited user interactions, often restricted to drag-and-drop with mouse movement and keystrokes. Recently, a novel framework proposes to explicitly specify the user interactions of modeling editors. In this thesis, we extend this framework to support multi-touch interactions when modeling. We propose an initial set of multi-touch gesture catalog to offer a variety of useful touch gestures. We demonstrate how our approach is applicable for generating modeling editors. Our approach yields more natural user interactions to perform typical modeling tasks.

Keyphrases: Multi-touches, Integrated development environment, Model-driven engineering, Domain-specific modeling
Confronter les crimes nazis : les procès militaires alliés et l'opinion publique en Allemagne occupée

This masters’ thesis analyses the connections between the first allied military trials held in postwar Germany and German public opinion toward the British and American occupation forces. Focused on the Belsen trial, held in the British occupation zone from September to November 1945, and the Dachau trial, held by the American military government in the U.S. occupation zone between November and December 1945, this study seeks to highlight the importance both trials held for the British and the Americans in establishing positive relations with the Germans. Using Belsen and Dachau as case studies, it argues that, while they were essential to British and American denazification and re-education programs, they also had to be conducted in a manner that ensured the best possible relationship the German public and the occupation forces in both the American and British occupation zones. I demonstrate that, from the initial steps implemented to set up the trials through their conclusion, both powers took German concerns and reactions to the judiciary procedures into account: first by anchoring the charges and the trials themselves in international law preceding the Second World War; then by providing the right to a defense to the accused. Both factors, the Allies believed, allowed them to claim a moral authority over their occupation zone. The memoir’s examination of the trials and their purpose is complimented by an analysis of the press coverage of the trials and public opinion surveys taken after the trials. This study states that the press coverage was oftentimes one the first instances in which Germans were confronted to the atrocities committed in the concentration camps. Finally, this study argues that, as a part of larger programs, the trials had a limited success as a tool to implement positive relations between the British and American occupation forces and the German population.

Keyphrases: Belsen trial, Dachau trial, Post-war trials, Allied trials, Military trials, International law, Petitions, Transitional justice, Denazification, Occupied Germany, War crimes, Concentration camps, Public opinion, German press
« Nous bumes a ta santé » : la correspondance transatlantique à travers les lettres reçues par Louis-Guillaume Verrier, magistrat à Québec (1728-1758)

Communications between France and Canada, in the 18th century, were defined by an annual rhythm marked by the seasons and the dangers of crossing the Atlantic. Louis-Guillaume Verrier was the king’s attorney-general at the Conseil supérieur of Québec between 1728 and 1758. Born in France, he moved to Québec to join the Conseil supérieur at the age of 37. He left us around 200 letters that he received during those 30 years. By reading these documents, we understand the importance of a good organization to make sure that the letters reach their addressee efficiently. All kinds of people write to Verrier, from close members of his family to mere acquaintances who wish to obtain services for a relative in New France. Family and friends of the attorney-general send news of their health and hope that their addressee’s is good too. Verrier also receives a lot of news concerning European politics and administrative or judiciary matters. This reflects (indirectly) Verrier’s desire to be kept informed of what goes on in the world that he left behind, pointing to his attachment to his motherland and the people that he no longer saw, but also a desire to return someday to continue his career. Living in an Atlantic world, Louis-Guillaume Verrier belongs at the same time to Canada, where he lives, and to France, where his relatives’ letters take him each year.

Keyphrases: Canada, Communications transatlantiques, Conseil supérieur, Louis-Guillaume Verrier, Québec, French Atlantic, Epistolarity, New France, Supreme Council, Transatlantic communications, 18th century