2024-2025 Evaluation campaign - Group E

STL department - Human Language Science and Technology

Portfolio of team M3
Models, Methods, and Multilingualism
Modèles, Méthodes et Multilinguisme

Typometrics

The first item is a publication corresponding to theme 1, highlighting the theme of universals and typology.

Kim Gerdes, S. Kahane, and X. Chen. Typometrics: From Implicational to Quantitative Universals in WordOrder Typology. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics (2021-...), 6(1), Jan. 2021. DOI: 10.5334/gjgl.764 hal-04067297

Context

The collaborative annotation framework provided by Universal Dependencies has paved the way for a quantitative typology, marking a shift from traditional categorical classifications to frequency-based descriptions of syntactic constructions.

Contribution

This paper develops the concept of word order universals based on a data analysis of the Universal Dependencies project, which proposes treebanks of more than 90 languages encoded with the same annotation scheme. The nature of the data allows the extraction of rich details for testing well-known typological implicational universals and further exploring new kinds of universals called quantitative universals. The paper shows how quantitative universals are, in essence, different from implicational universals, including statistical universals, because they no longer lay down any claims on categorical statements.

Impact

This paper published in the only general linguistics journal following the diamond model in 2021 has been cited many times. It has introduced a new field of research, Typometrics, and provided a complete set of updated diagrams reflecting this quantitative analysis that is accessible online.

Perceptual changes between adults and children for multimodal im/politeness in Japanese

The second item is a publication relating to theme 4, on the perception of prosodic attitudes, with intercultural, multimodal and developmental aspects.

T. Shochi, Albert Rilliard, and D. Erickson. Chapter 8. Perceptual changes between adults and children for multimodal im/politeness in Japanese. In A. H. Jucker, I. Hubscher, and L. Brown, editors, Multimodal Im/politeness: Signed, spoken, written, volume 333 of Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, pages 213-249. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Feb. 2023. DOI: 10.1075/pbns.333.08sho hal-04003226

Context

The research on the perception of prosodic attitudes is part of a broader framework focusing on audiovisual speech studies, particularly prosody. This research is being conducted in collaboration with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and aims to investigate the roles of audio and visual modalities in conveying various functions such as sentence modes, focus types, illocutions, and attitudes. The analysis of production and perception in controlled settings is intended to enhance our understanding of audiovisual prosody for face-to-face communication, especially in the context of Brazilian Portuguese.

Contribution

Japanese im/politeness attitudes are conveyed by audiovisual prosody in tandem with lexical markers. This work reports on two experiments about the acquisition by Japanese elementary school children of prosodic codes and social categories. An analysis of the audiovisual performances showed the changes in pitch and range in line with symbolic frequency and effort codes. The perceptual results showed that children learn to use and recognize im/polite expressions in a socially adequate fashion between 6 to 10 years old, thus showing an underlying growing cultural coherence gained with age.

Impact

This approach has led to the co-supervision of three Federal University of Rio de Janeiro students and the publication of numerous papers. Please refer to section 1.3 for more references

A speaking atlas of minority languages

Item 3 is an example of the team's ability to produce knowledge that is useful to society, and accessible to all. the Atlas sonore des langues régionales de France), which lets everyone read and listen to the same Aesop fable (La bise et le soleil), in French, regional languages and non-territorial languages of France.

Context

Speech samples in regional language varieties have been collected and visualised on geolinguistic maps which take the form of a speaking atlas of minority languages and dialects, available online and continuously enriched.

Contribution

The objective of this work is to show and valorise the linguistic diversity of various countries, through recordings collected in the field, a computer interface (which allows viewing the dialect areas) and a work of orthographic transcription. We present a website presenting interactive maps of France and its overseas territories, Belgium and Switzerland, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, Germany, Austria and other European countries, as well as American countries like Bolivia, from which the Aesop fable "The North Wind and the Sun" can be listened to and read in over 1000 versions, in indigenous languages. There is thus a scientific and heritage dimension in this work, insofar as a number of regional or minority languages are in a critical situation.

Impact

The Atlas sonore des langues régionales de France provides a high-profile showcase for the subject of regional languages and non-territorial languages of France, with over a million hits.

Qui a hacké Garoutzia ?

Item 4 illustrates the many projects carried out by researchers in M3, (see section 5.3) in the field of AI ethics. It's an engaging theatrical production "Qui a hacké Garoutzia ?" co-written by Laurence Devillers (with Serge Abiteboul and Gilles Dowek).

Context

Qui a hacké Garoutzia ? is a detective comedy in four acts about human memory, machine memory, and Lethe. It relates the successive lives of the main character, GaroutzIA, a conversational agent and a chatbot of the future. It's a pretext to get the audience wondering about the future of these technologies and to ask the big question about life, the universe, and everything else.

Contribution

Garoutzia, Botpower's domestic artificial intelligence, witnesses the death of its owners. A police mystery forces her to retrace the course of her digital memory and discover, in contact with humans, the pleasure of words, transgression, friendship, death... How can we apply the codes of burlesque and derision to deal seriously with the philosophical questions linked to the irruption of conversational machines? How do bots learn to imitate human emotions without ever feeling them? Can their fake empathy influence human actions? And what is the role of the company that manufactures these robots? Three renowned computer scientists decided to illustrate the questions raised by the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence in a play, in order to reach a wider audience.

Impact

The play was performed in Avignon in the festival off in the summer of 2023 and was revived at the Scène de Recherche in Paris-Saclay in December 2023; the play will be staged at the Les Enfants Du Paradis theater in Paris from September 2024 until the end of the year. This comedy play renews and dusts off the vision of ethics in AI.