NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Étude de métaphores conceptuelles anatomiques en espagnol : comparaison d’un corpus traduit et d’un corpus non traduit

In biomedicine, as in other fields, phraseology and terminology are essential elements for optimal communication. Yet, in a field where precision and objectivity are highly important, there is an apparent contradiction: the usual use of metaphor. However, we are not dealing here with the rhetorical device under which metaphor is usually envisioned. What we are dealing with is the conceptual metaphor, which makes it possible to express the modes of conceptualization specific to the field, particularly through phraseology. Since conceptual metaphorisation is closely related to languages-cultures, the question arises whether trans-lated works and works written directly in a language express different modes of metaphori-cal conceptualisation or not.  Our study examines the modes of metaphorical conceptualization (MMC) expressed in Span-ish in the field of topographical anatomy. It is part of a larger translation study research pro-gram, which focuses on MMCs in the biomedical field. Anatomy is a particularly rich area for the exploration of conceptual metaphor. We have identified and characterized metaphorical conceptualization indices (MCI) in in texts selected from reference books or teaching manu-als in the field of topographic anatomy, focusing on vascular structures (arteries and veins), nerves and some muscles, with the aim of comparing two sub-corpuses : one is composed of texts written directly in Spanish and the other, of texts translated into this language. We characterized the MCMs conveyed by these MCIs and compared the results obtained in the two sub-corpuses. Taking into account the limitations of our study, we show that the corpus written in Spanish presents a greater variability in the expression of conceptual metaphors than the translated corpus. We thus hope to contribute to a better understanding of the pro-cesses of specialized writing and translation.

Keyphrases: biomedical translation, anatomy, conceptual metaphor, metaphorical conceptualisation indices, phraseology
Tactical block planning for intermodal rail transportation

The thesis presents the tactical block-planning problem for intermodal railroads, which has been little studied so far. We propose a new block service network design model considering the specificity of intermodal rail. The research focuses on the North American context and follows a close collaboration with one of the major North American railroad companies. Blocking constitutes an important rail freight transport operation, by which cars with potentially different origins and destinations are grouped to be moved and handled as a single unit, yielding economies of scale. The literature is limited to works addressing the classical train blocking problem, where demand is given in terms of cars to be blocked among specific OD pairs. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work has been dedicated to an intermodal transportation context, where demand is expressed in terms of containers to be moved from a given origin terminal to a given destination terminal, hence introducing an additional consolidation process. We propose a blocking model that considers several types of containers and railcars, integrating the container-to-car assignment. We present a new continuous-time, three-layer service network design model formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP), with the objective of minimizing the total transportation cost composed by block selection, operation costs, and handling demand cost. The model can be solved using commercial solver for realistic sizes. We illustrate the performance and interest of the proposed method through an extensive case study of a major North American railroad.

Keyphrases: Rail intermodal, Blocking, Intermodal rail, Service network design model, Case study.
Look-ahead meta-learning for continual learning

The continual learning problem involves training models with limited capacity to perform well on a set of an unknown number of sequentially arriving tasks. This setup can of- ten see a learning system undergo catastrophic forgetting, when learning a newly seen task causes interference on the learning progress of old tasks. While recent work has shown that meta-learning has the potential to reduce interference between old and new tasks, the current training procedures tend to be either slow or offline, and sensitive to many hyper-parameters. In this work, we propose Look-ahead MAML (La-MAML), a fast optimisation-based meta- learning algorithm for online-continual learning, aided by a small episodic memory. This is achieved by realising the equivalence of a multi-step MAML objective to a time-aware con- tinual learning objective adopted in prior work. The equivalence leads to the formulation of an intuitive algorithm that we call Continual-MAML (C-MAML), employing continual meta- learning to optimise a model to perform well across a series of changing data distributions. By additionally incorporating the modulation of per-parameter learning rates in La-MAML, our approach provides a more flexible and efficient way to mitigate catastrophic forgetting compared to conventional prior-based methods. This modulation also has connections to prior work on meta-descent, which we identify as an important direction of research to de- velop better optimizers for continual learning. In experiments conducted on real-world visual classification benchmarks, La-MAML achieves performance superior to other replay-based, prior-based and meta-learning based approaches for continual learning. We also demonstrate that it is robust, and more scalable than many recent state-of-the-art approaches.

Keyphrases: Meta Learning, Continual Learning, Machine Learning, E-learning, Online learning, Learning rate modulation
Tisser la résurgence à travers le wampum comme approche rhétorique décoloniale de certaines œuvres de Nadia Myre

Aboriginal artistic creation is inseparable from political struggles. In a colonial context, Aboriginal ways of being, acting and thinking are deeply affected. Art is a powerful weapon in this struggle for decolonization. This study will therefore focus on the transformative and decolonizing potential of Aboriginal artistic creation through the artistic practice of Algonquin artist Nadia Myre. Several of her works address the mixed identity and colonial violence suffered by Aboriginal people. Indian Act (fig.1) denounces, through a traditional and participatory beaded rewriting, a colonial law that has led to a profound epistemic injustice. To address these issues, we will focus on a specific object, the wampum. In this research, we will consider it as a vector of deep resurgence and decolonization. The essential ancient and contemporary socio-political position of wampum makes it a privileged didactic support of resurgence. Through the use of the wampum motif in Nadia Myre's artistic practice, we will be able to walk through these struggles and understand how Aboriginal artists engage them. Wampum will be presented as a discursive rhetoric, material and immaterial, a hypertext, a hyperlink (Haas 2007) between tradition and modernity, orality and writing, which will be supported by the theory of intermediality. Jacques Derrida and the Deconstruction will also be convened to examine the rewriting work done by Myre in Indian Act. It will also be a question of understanding how Nadia Myre's participatory proposal could enable an allochtonous engagement towards decolonial epistemic justice.

Keyphrases: Wampum, Art autochtone, Nadia Myre, Angela Haas, Taiaiake Alfred, Leanne Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Jacques Derrida, Colonialism, Native art, Indian Act, Intermediality, Hypertext
Les défis de la réinsertion sociale : regard éclairé sur la réalité vécue par la clientèle en maison de transition

Reintegration is a difficult process and individuals who have been affected by the justice system can benefit from interventions that help them to be autonomous, law-abiding, and integrated into their communities. Current research, however, seldom goes beyond identifying the difficulties in this process. Our qualitative study was an in-depth exploration of the challenges encountered by ex-convicts who had been provided with lodging in halfway houses as part of their reentry process. Six categories of challenges were identified following a content analysis of the interviews (n=16) : return to society, financial and occupational situation, social network, personal development, stigmatization, and living in halfway houses. Experiences specific to certain profiles (length of sentence, sexual delinquency) are noted. Results are discussed in relation to desistance theories. Among other things, the study highlights the ways in which legal conditions and the stigmatization of offenders can lead to counter-productive outcomes.

Keyphrases: Interventions, Reentry, Intervention, Semi-structured interviews, Sex offenders
Monitoring de l’environnement atmosphérique en milieu urbain intégrant des images de télédétection : le cas des particules fines (PM2.5)

Epidemiological research around the world has shown that exposure of urban populations to fine microparticles (PM2.5) suspended in air from, among other things, car combustion, is responsible for many cases of lung and cardiovascular disease and even mortality. However, most of these studies examine urban centers as ensembles without considering that population exposure to microparticles is not homogeneous across an urban space. For example, individuals living near major arterial roads are much more exposed to microparticles than others living in low traffic neighborhoods. Unfortunately, ground stations measuring PM2.5 are few and far between to generate accurate microparticle concentration maps at fine scales. One way to spatialize information on microparticle concentrations is to introduce remotely sensed images that allows to calculate an optical parameter of aerosols, their optical depth. The use of medium-to-fine-resolution images is not common in this area. So, we wanted to look at their potential. Tests with hyperspectral and multispectral images at these resolutions have shown that optical depth can be estimated with enough accuracy. The AODFinder software developed for this purpose performs well. Unfortunately, the small sample of AOD values and PM2.5 concentration measurements did not allow us to conclude on the possibility of using AOD as a proxy for PM2.5 and thus on the possibility of refining microparticle monitoring at the local level.

Keyphrases: Fine, PM2.5, Hyperspectral, Multispectral, Resolution medium, Air pollution, Aerosol optical depth (AOD), Atmospheric code, Dark target
Ethos d’une transfuge intellectuelle : présentation de soi dans L’écriture comme un couteau et Les années d’Annie Ernaux

How can an author call himself an « intellectual », especially when one, such as Annie Ernaux, cumulates both the illegitimacy of a class-passer and a feminine subject? Yet, her vision of writing as a political activity and her positions in the media do assimilate her to the figure of the intellectual. This dissertation thereby aims to provide a definition of the intellectual woman, to which Annie Ernaux’s example contributes significantly. Studying the author interview L’écriture comme un couteau (2003) and her impersonal autobiography Les années (2008), I intend to show how Annie Ernaux displays the ethos of an intellectual and even moves beyond the model, while she embodies the figures of the autobiographer, the ethnologist, the "involved" writer, the class-passer, the head of family, and the aging woman. If she surpasses that model, isn’t it also because she primarily identifies herself as a class-passer? Driven by the class-passer’s sense of guilt and responsibility, Annie Ernaux uses the sensation of being in-between social classes to enable her writing. Therefore, her auto-socio-biographical works become a literary commitment to the dominated. The study of L’écriture comme un couteau will define the conceptual basis of Annie Ernaux’s ethos as an class-passer intellectual, while in Les années, the analysis of the narrative voices « on », « nous » and « elle » will explore how the intimate intricates itself to the social, the subjective experience to the collective memory. In other words, while studying the ethos in Annie Ernaux’s works, this dissertation examines how the author has shaped an image of herself as a legitimate class-passer intellectual within the public sphere of her time.

Keyphrases: Annie Ernaux, Implication, Ethos, Class-passer intellectual, Commitment, Ethos, Author interview, Autobiography, Women's writing, French literature
Bruit blanc ; suivi de Les dispositifs sonores dans la poésie de Marie Uguay et de Joséphine Bacon

This research-creation M.A. thesis explores the narrative avenues of the impacts of sound and its effects to control the body. The creative writing work will show the mechanisms, feelings, and the conscious or unconscious constraints that are facing different characters with the urban soundscape. Those mechanisms, whether they are interiorized or not by the characters, will open a reflexion on the dispositif, as imagined by Foucault and later interpreted by Agamben. The dispositif (or apparatus) creates, between the subjectivity on which it acts and all of the contents it holds hidden or unhidden, a « process of subjectification » or « desubjectification »: it organizes, it creates a network of forces upon the subject. Bruit blanc, the creative writing work of this thesis, places characters that are hunted by ideals of a liberation of the body by music, whether this liberation − or its failure − is spatial, temporal, social or psychic. This work will also give space to an analysis of two poetry booklets: Un thé dans la toundra/ Nipishapui nete mushuat (2013) by Joséphine Bacon and L'Outre-vie (1979) by Marie Uguay. Those authors create upon reading a sonic and vocal dimension, a sensibility − even a hypersensibility − to hearing, especially through the teueikan in Bacon's poems and through racines sonores (« sound roots ») for Uguay. Their books present many esthetical and philosophical considerations on hearing as a physical and physiological phenomenon: sound becomes a vector throughout which we can imagine subjectivity in unsettling spatial and temporal possibilities that the body seems to forbid. R.Murray Schafer names « schizophonia » the splitting between what makes the sound and what transmits it which comes with the proliferation of recording technologies. This delayed connection to music that can be produced far from the bodies of musicians (when concerning instrumental music) plays a role in this network of forces, in this apparatus that keeps our interest. How can we think those effects of decontextualisation? Bruit blanc embodies the modalities and the effects of an enunciative voice that lives with different representations of a body hearing as a receptor of delayed realities, allowing to imagine the body in unquieting ways;to think about the possibility of listening to others, and to the listening of otherness.

Keyphrases: Marie Uguay, Joséphine Bacon, Sound studies, Contemporary poetry, Creative writing, Desubjectification, Places and spaces, Postcolonialisme, Postcolonialism
Association between timing of asthma diagnosis and medication use during pregnancy

Asthma medication use during pregnancy is recommended by international guidelines to maintain control of symptoms since poor control has been shown to increase the risk of adverse perinatal outcomes. To date, no studies have evaluated the association between the timing of new-onset asthma and the use of asthma medications during pregnancy. The objective of this study is to assess whether asthma medication use during pregnancy differs in women with asthma diagnosed during the first 19 weeks of pregnancy compared to those diagnosed 2 years before pregnancy.  We conducted a retrospective cohort study using the Quebec asthma and pregnancy database. The primary outcome was the use of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS), ICS/long-acting ß2-agonists (LABA) and short-acting ß2-agonists (SABA) during pregnancy defined as the number of filled prescriptions from 20 weeks of pregnancy (Cohort entry – CE –) until delivery. Oral corticosteroids (OCS) use during pregnancy was defined as the number of days of filled prescriptions from CE until delivery. Poisson regression models were used to compare the rates of asthma medication use between women diagnosed before and early in pregnancy, while adjusting for potential confounders. The secondary outcomes were the treatment dispensed at diagnosis defined as asthma medications filled at the pharmacy in the month prior and the month following the date of asthma diagnosis and adherence to ICS during follow-up estimated with the proportion of days covered (PDC).  The cohort included 1 731 women with asthma diagnosed before and 359 early in pregnancy. Women diagnosed early in pregnancy were more likely to use ICS [aRR 1.9, 95% CI 1.6–2.3] and SABA [aRR 2.0, 95% CI 1.7–2.4] than women diagnosed pre-pregnancy. No difference in the use ICS/LABA [aRR 0.9, 95% CI 0.7–1.3] and OCS [aRR 0.8, 95% CI 0.6–1.2]. The most common asthma controller and reliever dispensed in the month prior to diagnosis and the month after diagnosis were ICS and SABA, respectively, for both sub-cohorts. The mean PDC over the study follow-up among users of ICS-based controllers in women diagnosed pre-pregnancy was quite similar to those diagnosed early in pregnancy (27.7%; 95% CI 25.3–30.1 vs 24.5%; 95% CI 21.3–27.8). With respect to adherence, the linear regression model revealed that the adjusted difference in ICS adherence was not statistically significant (-3.6; 95% CI -7.9 to 0.6).  Asthma diagnosed early in pregnancy might suggest a more persistent asthma in nature due to hormonal changes requiring more use of ICS and SABA. Taking into consideration low asthma medication use and adherence during pregnancy, these results support a closer medical follow-up of asthmatic women newly diagnosed before or early in pregnancy by providing patients with educational resources about asthma management to maintain asthma under control and prevent serious perinatal outcomes.

Keyphrases: Asthma, Asthma medication use, Maternal asthma, Adherence, Pregnancy, Epidemiology, Quebec Asthma and Pregnancy database
La psychè sur la page : l’expérience du carnet chez Simone Weil

Self-writing has come to constitute a literary genre which is difficult to define yet is part of a long tradition offering writers various means and methods of approaching their own psyche and body of work. The publication of personal notebooks written by major authors indeed demonstrates the crucial role played by this intimate practice in the elaboration of intellectual systems. Literary studies have nevertheless tended to neglect the transformational impact of this specific form of writing. Simone Weil, a French mystic and philosopher of the 20th century, has particularly enriched the genre of self-writing. The numerous notebooks she wrote show the construction of a deep and vivid mind that associates intellectual creation with strong self-discipline. The present master’s thesis will aim at highlighting the fundamental role of the notebook within the creative process of this philosopher. Such a perspective should shed new light on certain aspects of the academic literature dedicated to Weil’s works. The Introduction of this thesis offers an overview of the Western tradition of personal notebooks, which exerted a vast influence on Weil’s writings. Since Greek antiquity, writing in the first person has been an important part of self-improvement exercises, aimed at spiritual perfection. This approach is particularly visible in the hypomnêmata – taking of notes – introduced by Greek and Roman philosophical schools and developed in early Christian monastic practices focused on self-sacrifice. Once this context has been established, the main body of the thesis will focus more specifically on Weil’s notebooks. A first chapter will present her life and works, which will then allow for a focus on certain themes present in her personal writing. I will begin by focusing on self- mastery through means of writing in the first person. Next, I will analyse the importance of subjectivity in this philosopher’s worldview, before dealing with the rich intertextuality of Weil’s notebooks. Finally, I will deal with the influence of Weil’s personal experience on her own concept of décréation. The importance of writing in the inspiration process will be of particular interest in this final chapter. The main objective of this thesis is to analyse Weil’s writings through the lens of self-writing. It additionally aims at broadening analytical perspectives on the importance of personal writing in the construction of self and insisting on the role of the notebook as a life companion for the writer.

Keyphrases: Simone Weil, carnet personnel, hypomnêmata, tradition, self-writing, personal notebook, spiritual exercises, inner experience, psyche, hypomnemata
Au-delà de l’arc-en-ciel : parcours, trajectoires et altérités dans le Village de Montréal

This Master’s thesis explores the diversity and heterogeneity of space within Montréal’s (gay) Village. It seeks to analyze this neighborhood beyond what its ‘commercial showcase’ might reveal at first sight. The Village’s bars and clubs, as well as its shops, community organizations and sociodemographic composition, are not thought as homogeneous, but rather mosaics of multiple people, groups and communities across space. These latter, depending on their trajectories and routes, often have different perceptions and experiences of a single place or of the Village as a whole. Based on a document analysis and interviews with six (6) LGBTQ activists, this thesis reveals multiple strategies and ways to engage space, as well as the networks and spaces within Montreal’s Village where this diversity can be experienced.

Keyphrases: Montreal gay Village, LGBTQ communities, gentrification, city, neighborhood, power, community organizations