NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Étude des types de compliments et leurs liens avec l’estime de soi et les processus motivationnels d’enfants de 8 à 12 ans

Different lines of research have focused on compliments that parents should avoid in order not to jeopardize the development of children’s self-esteem and optimal motivational processes (e.g. Kamins and Dweck, 1999; Kast and Konnor, 1988). However, no study had yet attempted to identify potentially optimal compliments to favor these developments. Through three studies, this exploratory thesis thus aimed at comparing different compliments conceptualized as positive in the literature using a sample of mother-child dyads (N = 65, mean age of the children = 10.20 years).  The first study examined the relations between different types of compliments, on one hand, and children's self-esteem and motivational processes on the other, while controlling for demographic variables of children’s sex and age. Given that the different types of compliments were likely to coexist but were never compared in a single study, their relations with the dependent variables were examined while also controlling for their interrelations using multiple regressions. The second study aimed at highlighting the links between children's perception of their mother typical parenting practices and the different types of compliments conceptualized as positive in the literature. To investigate these relations, we relied on questionnaires filled out by two different respondents (children and their mothers). The third study relied on an experimental design to investigate the situational impacts of comparative, result-oriented and descriptive compliments on children's perceived competence (or their situational self-esteem) and motivational processes, with a focus on the potential impacts of three moderators likely to accentuate, or reduce, the effect of the experimental manipulation (i.e. sex, age and children's global self-esteem).  The main results show that it is possible to provide a comprehensive portrait of the compliments conceptualized as positive in the literature by distinguishing four types: comparative, result-oriented, process-oriented and descriptive compliments. Two of these compliments, namely result-oriented compliments and process-oriented compliments, seem to be the most used. The thesis also reveals that only descriptive compliments seem positively related to children's self-esteem (global and situational), especially for girls and children reporting lower than average self-esteem. Through the pursuit of these three objectives, this thesis contributes to the advancement of knowledge on compliments, to self-determination theory (SDT) and helps identify intervention avenues that will allow parents to intervene and communicate optimally with their children.

Keyphrases: compliments, relation parents-enfants, structure, autonomy support, competence, controlling practices, goal orientation, goal setting, motivational processes, parent-child relationship, parenting, positive feedback, self-determination theory, self-determined and non-self-determined motivation, self-esteem, structure
Searching for supersymmetry using deep learning with the ATLAS detector

The Standard Model of particle physics (SM) is a fundamental theory of nature whose validity has been extensively confirmed by experiments. However, some theoretical and experimental problems subsist, which motivates searches for alternative theories to supersede it. Supersymmetry (SUSY), which associate new fundamental particles to each SM particle, is one of the best-motivated such theory and could solve some of the biggest outstanding problems with the SM. For example, many SUSY scenarios predict stable neutral particles that could explain observations of dark matter in the universe. The discovery of SUSY would also represent a huge step towards a unified theory of the universe. Searches for SUSY are at the heart of the experimental program of the ATLAS collaboration, which exploits a state-of-the-art particle detector installed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. The probability to observe many supersymmetric particles went up when the LHC ramped up its collision energy to 13~TeV, the highest ever achieved in laboratory, but so far no evidence for SUSY has been recorded by current searches, which are mostly based on well-known simple techniques such as counting experiments.  This thesis documents the implementation of a novel deep learning-based approach using only the four-momenta of selected physics objects, and its application to the search for supersymmetric particles using the full ATLAS 2015-2018  dataset. Motivated by naturalness considerations as well as by the problem of dark matter, the search focuses on finding evidence for supersymmetric partners of the gluon (the gluino), third generation quarks (the stop and the sbottom), and gauge bosons (the neutralino). Many recently introduced physics-specific machine learning developments are employed, such as directly using detector-recorded energies and momenta of produced particles instead of first deriving a restricted set of physically motivated variables and parametrizing the classification model with the masses of the particles searched for, which allows optimal sensitivity for all mass hypothesis. This method improves the statistical significance of the search by up to 85 times that of the previous ATLAS analysis for some mass hypotheses, after accounting for the luminosity difference.  No significant excesses above the SM background are recorded. Gluino masses below 2.45 TeV and neutralino masses below 1.7 TeV are excluded at the 95% confidence level, greatly increasing the previous limit on two simplified models of gluino pair production with off-shell stops and sbottoms, respectively.

Keyphrases: Particle physics, Supersymmetry, LHC, ATLAS, Machine learning, Deep learning, Neural networks
La Staatslehre de 1813 et la question de l’éducation chez Fichte

Education is no doubt of central importance for Fiche’s conception of the state since it must lead in the end to the free acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the law. I examine the main tenets of the Fichtean theory of education (primacy of oral teaching, Socratic method, mistrust towards the written word), and in particular of his conception of the university (as opposed to the liberal model of Humboldt and of Schleiermacher). I finally ask the question: to what extent can a civic education ultimately based of the doctrine of science be characterized as “authoritarian?”

Keyphrases: Fichte, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Education, Oral exposition, Academic freedom
Les polarons magnétiques et la phase nématique dans l'Eu1-xCaxB6

The main objective of my thesis is about Europium, a magnetic rare earth, based compounds which produces magnetic semiconductors. The primary goal was to measure magnetic correlations in the EuB6 using SANS (small angle neutron scattering) technique, more precisely, to measure the correlation length of magnetic polarons. The raison for studying magnetic polarons in EuB6 is that their presence can explain the large magnetoresistance near the Curie transition associated to a ferromagnetic order. This is a particularly difficult task since Europium (Eu2+) is a very strong neutron absorber, thus affecting the acquisition time. Long exposure times were necessary to obtain adequate background. After the analysis of the data, we have finally been able to conclude that magnetic polarons are definitely present. In addition, their presence increases significantly magnetic fluctuations. On the other hand, the presence of these magnetic fluctuations makes the task of measuring the correlation length more difficult. The biggest discovery of my Ph.D. was the nematic phase in the EuB6 using angle-based magneto-resistance measurements. The nematic phase is caracterized by a breaking of symmetry only in the electronic properties. These data have allowed me to better understand the role played by magnetic polarons in this system. By doping the system with calcium, we confirmed the presence of a transition to a spin glass order from a concentration of 30% calcium. This compound seems to have the same nematic phase as its parent compound. However, this phase is much more concentrated around the spin glass transition because of lack of magnetic fluctuations above it.

Keyphrases: Diﬀraction neutro-nique, EuB6, Nematicity, Hexaborides, Spintronics, Magnetic polarons, Neutron diﬀraction
Domaines nodaux et points critiques de fonctions propres d’opérateurs de Schrödinger

The theme of this thesis is the study of the eigenfunctions of the Laplacian and Schrödinger operators. Let (M,g) be a manifold and V : M → R. We are looking at solutions of the following equation: (∆_g + V ) f_λ = λ f_λ .  The operator ∆_g + V is called a Schrödinger operator and V is called the potential. The simplest and most studied example is the Laplacian (we put V ≡ 0 on M ). If M is compact and without boundary, then there exists a sequence 0 = λ_0 < λ_1 ≤ λ_2 -> +∞ that makes the spectrum of ∆_g and a sequence of eigenfunctions f_n such that ∆_g f_n = λ_n f_n . This decomposition also holds for various potentials and manifolds. Firstly, we studied the nodal domains of the eigenfunctions as the eigenvalues tend to infinity. The nodal domains of a function f on M are the connected components of M \f^{−1} (0). They can be used to understand the oscillatory character of eigenfunctions by counting the number of times that f changes sign. The principal goal of this thesis was to generalize Pleijel’s nodal domain theorem [52] to other Schrödinger operators. In the article [2], we showed that the upper bound in Pleijel’s theorem also holds for the quantum harmonic oscillator. Furthermore, this bound can be improved depending on the quadratic form that defines the potential. Afterwards, in the article [3], we generalized the result from [2] to a large class of radial potentials, including ones that tend to zero at infinity. These include the Coulomb potential, which modelizes the hydrogen atom in free space.  We also studied the number of critical points of Laplace eigenfunctions. Until recently, there were only known lower bounds for certain manifolds [36], but no upper bound was known. In 2019, Buhovsky, Logunov and Sodin [18] constructed a metric on T^2 and a sequence of Laplace eigenfunctions which all have infinitely many critical points. In our article [4], we used a different method to create metrics on T^2 and S^2 and Laplace eigenfunctions for these metrics that have infinitely many critical points. Furthermore, these metrics can be taken arbitrarily close to the flat metric on T^2 and the round metric on S^2. These constructions also provide strong counterexamples to the Courant-Hermann conjecture on the number of nodal domains of linear combinations of Laplace eigenfunctions.

Keyphrases: Schrödinger, Courant, Pleijel, Spectral geometry, Laplacian, critical points, nodal domains
Neural approaches to dialog modeling

This thesis by article consists of four articles which contribute to the ﬁeld of deep learning, speciﬁcally in understanding and learning neural approaches to dialog systems. The ﬁrst article takes a step towards understanding if commonly used neural dialog architectures eﬀectively capture the information present in the conversation history. Through a series of perturbation experiments on popular dialog datasets, weﬁndthatcommonly used neural dialog architectures like recurrent and transformer-based seq2seq models are rarely sensitive to most input context perturbations such as missing or reordering utterances, shuﬄing words, etc. The second article introduces a simple and cost-eﬀective way to collect large scale datasets for modeling task-oriented dialog systems. This approach avoids the requirement of a com-plex argument annotation schema. The initial release of the dataset includes 13,215 task-based dialogs comprising six domains and around 8k unique named entities, almost 8 times more than the popular MultiWOZ dataset. The third article proposes to improve response generation quality in open domain dialog systems by jointly modeling the utterances with the dialog attributes of each utterance. Dialog attributes of an utterance refer to discrete features or aspects associated with an utterance like dialog-acts, sentiment, emotion, speaker identity, speaker personality, etc. The ﬁnal article introduces an embedding-free method to compute word representations on-the-ﬂy. This approach signiﬁcantly reduces the memory footprint which facilitates de-ployment in on-device (memory constraints) devices. Apart from being independent of the vocabulary size, we ﬁnd this approach to be inherently resilient to common misspellings.

Keyphrases: task-oriented dialog systems, dialog-acts, multiwoz, locality sensitive hashing, self-attention, recurrent networks, neural networks, deep learning, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, machine learning, Auto-attention, Dynamic computational graph, Recursive networks, Wizard-of-oz, Natural language inference, Sentiment analysis
Traffic prediction and bilevel network design

The subject of this thesis is the modeling of traffic in road networks and its integration in optimization models. In the literature, these two topics have to a large extent evolved independently: traffic is predicted more accurately by increasingly complex mathematical models, but this progress has not been incorporated in network design models where road users play a crucial role. The goal of this work is to integrate random utility models calibrated with real data into bilevel optimization models through an efficient Benders decomposition. This particular decomposition  generalizes to a wide class of problems commonly found in the literature and can be used to solved large-scale instances.  The first article presents a general methodology to use GPS data gathered from a fleet of vehicles to estimate the parameters of a recursive logit demand model. The GPS traces are first matched to the arcs of a network through an algorithm taking into account various factors. The paths resulting from these sequences of arcs, along with their characteristics, are used to estimate parameters of a choice model. The parameters represent users' perception of each of these characteristics in regards to their path choice behaviour. The data used in this article comes from trucks used by a number of transportation companies operating mainly in the Montreal region.  The second article addresses the integration of a random utility maximization model in a new bilevel formulation for the general flow capture problem. The proposed model allows for a representation of different user behaviors in regards to their path choice by defining appropriate arc utilities. These arc utilities are stochastic which further contributes in capturing real user behavior. This bilevel model is linearized through the inclusion of a Lagrangian term based on strong duality which paves the way for a particularly efficient Benders decomposition. The numerical experiments are mostly conducted on a network representing the city of Winnipeg which demonstrates the ability to solve problems of a relatively large size.  The third article illustrates how the approach used in the second article can be generalized to a particular form of bilevel models which encompasses many different problems. The decomposition is first presented in a general setting and subsequently in a context where the lower level of the bilevel model is a shortest path problem. In order to demonstrate that this form is general, two distinct applications are adapted to fit the required form: hazmat transportation network design and general flow capture. A third application, joint network design and pricing, is also similarly explored in Appendix B of this thesis.

Keyphrases: GPS data, route choice, recursive choice models, intermodal terminals, flow capture, Benders decomposition, bilevel optimization, random utility maximization
Leveraging distant supervision for improved named entity recognition

Recent years have seen a leap in deep learning techniques that greatly changed the way Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks are tackled. In a couple of years, neural networks and word embeddings quickly became central components to be adopted in the domain.   Distant supervision (DS) is a well-used technique in NLP to produce labeled data from partially annotated examples. Traditionally, it was mainly used as training data in the absence of manual annotations, or as additional training data to improve generalization performances.   In this thesis, we study how distant supervision can be employed within a modern deep learning based NLP framework. As deep learning algorithms gets better when massive amount of data is provided (especially for representation learning), we revisit the task of generating distant supervision data from Wikipedia. We apply post-processing treatments on the original dump to further increase the quantity of labeled examples, while introducing a reasonable amount of noise.    Then, we explore different methods for using distant supervision data for representation learning, mainly to learn classic and contextualized word representations. Due to its importance as a basic component in many NLP applications, we choose Named-Entity Recognition (NER) as our main task. We experiment on standard NER benchmarks showing state-of-the-art performances. By doing so, we investigate a more interesting setting, that is, improving the cross-domain (generalization) performances.

Keyphrases: Distant Supervision, Wikipedia, Word Representation, NER, Generalization
La diégétisation transmédiatique : processus de construction de représentations fictionnelles à travers les médias

Since the end of the last century, technological, economic and socio-cultural convergences have helped to promote the large-scale deployment of representations of universes, real and fictional, on many media and platforms. Renewed media creation and consumption practices have thus emerged around media objects that, in the absence of other terms, could for a time be described as new media. Transmedia has become part of this media dynamic, no longer seen as stable entities, but as flows with changing, porous contours. Representing the future of our relationship with the media and the world for some, stillborn for others, transmedia has been the subject of many fantasies and a number of studies that are far from complete. This research proposes to lay the theoretical foundations for a dispassionate reflection on transmedia phenomena. They will essentially be considered in their fictional dimension, as conceived by creators of diegetic universes, i.e. universes that can be inhabited and navigated by a character and by an interpreter, i.e. a reader-spectator-listener-player-interactor. It is by transporting oneself physically or in thought into these universes, through mediatized modalities constructing the Transmedia Text, that creators and interpreters will eventually participate in a transmedia diegetization, the nature, ins and outs of which will have to be understood. We will define the terms media, platforms, modalities and diegesis that will be useful to us in order to understand how, in this context of convergences, different types of transmedia diegetization are deployed. The latter will then be considered as processes involving three instances, namely creators, transmedia Texts and interpreters, paradoxically unfolding in territories that are sometimes located next to or outside the media and/or their own Text. Finally, we will highlight the challenges and issues raised by these all-out diegetic deployments.

Keyphrases: Diegesis, Diegetization, Multimodality, Transmedia, Transmedia Text
La prévisualisation comme activité ludique : jouer à faire un film

Film previsualization (or previs), that is to say the visual formatting of the scenario aimed at anticipating the film to come, constitutes a practice whose origins date back to early cinema. According to a lusory perspective, our thesis proposes that the recent transition from traditional previs tools to digital devices involving videogame technologies transforms visual preparation by making it more similar to a game, or eventually to a toy. Our thesis focuses on the creative approach of the director, more specifically the process of imagination and how it leads to the design of a simulacrum of the film through an iterative method while using a variety of media fit to represent the intended work. This approach takes place mainly in the context of feature films involving a substantial part of visual effects, a corpus particularly likely to involve elaborate strategies relating to logistical or creative preparation. Following a historical background, a typology of the main forms of previsualization and the identification of variables suited to guide subsequent analysis, both notions of imagination and lusory attitude are studied in order to better define the aspects of film creation that relate to play and game. Afterwards, our thesis details the twin figure of the “construction game” and the “toy to build” representing the nature and dynamics of previsualization from a lusory perspective. This will be achieved by means of a case study involving a videogame remedied as a machinima tool. Our thesis then examines the different contexts of film production as to their relevance to previsualization practices performed by the director, while exposing the aspects of filmmaking that elude such practices when carried out by means of traditional devices. In the light of this examination, our thesis suggests the emergence of a new context of play, deployed transversally to the traditional production chain, and likely to favor the practice of a lusory-inspired previsualization that addresses in a successful way some of the shortcomings previously listed.

Keyphrases: Imagination, Previsualization, Videogame, Filmmaking, Construction toy, Lusory attitude, Machinima, Simulacrum