Linguistique | EPFL Graph Search

La linguistique est une discipline scientifique s’intéressant à l’étude du langage. Elle n'est pas prescriptive mais descriptive. La prescription correspond à la norme, c'est-à-dire ce qui est jugé correct linguistiquement par les grammairiens. À l'inverse, la linguistique se contente de décrire la langue telle qu'elle est et non telle qu'elle devrait être. On trouve des témoignages de réflexions sur le langage dès l'Antiquité avec des philosophes comme Platon. Cependant il faut attendre le pour voir se dégager une approche scientifique autour des faits de langues. Ferdinand de Saussure a grandement contribué à la description du langage et des langues, notamment avec son influent Cours de linguistique générale (1916) qui est devenu un classique dans ce domaine et a imposé la conception structurale du langage qui domine largement la linguistique contemporaine en dépit des conflits d'écoles. André Martinet a aussi contribué à cette discipline avec son ouvrage Éléments de linguistique

Character-level Chinese-English Translation through ASCII Encoding

Mi Xue Tan

Character-level Neural Machine Translation(NMT) models have recently achieved impressive results on many language pairs. They mainly do well for Indo-European language pairs, where the languages share the same writing system. However, for translating between Chinese and English, the gap between the two different writing systems poses a ma-jor challenge because of a lack of systematic correspondence between the individual linguistic units.In this paper, we enable character-level NMT for Chinese, by breaking down Chinese characters into linguistic units similar to that of Indo-European languages. We use the Wubi encoding scheme, which preserves the original shape and semantic in-formation of the characters, while also being reversible. We show promising results from training Wubi-based models on the character-and subword-level with recurrent as well as convolutional models.

Association for Computational Linguistics2018

Analyse multi-échelle de n-grammes sur 200 années d'archives de presse

Vincent Christian Buntinx

The recent availability of large corpora of digitized texts over several centuries opens the way to new forms of studies on the evolution of languages. In this thesis, we study a corpus of 4 million press articles covering a period of 200 years. The thesis tries to measure the evolution of written French on this period at the level of words and expressions, but also in a more global way by attempting to define integrated measures of linguistic evolution. The methodological choice is to introduce a minimum of linguistic hypotheses in this study by developing new measures around the simple notion of n-gram, a sequence of n consecutive words. The thesis explores on this basis the potential of already known concepts as temporal frequency profiles and their diachronic correlations, but also introduces new abstractions such as the notion of resilient linguistic kernel or the decomposition of profiles into solidified expressions according to simple statistical models. Through the use of distributed computational techniques, it develops methods to test the relevance of these concepts on a large amount of textual data and thus allows to propose a virtual observatory of the diachronic evolutions associated with a given corpus. On this basis, the thesis explores more precisely the multi-scale dimension of linguistic phenomena by considering how standardized measures evolve when applied to increasingly long n-grams. The discrete and continuous scale from the isolated entities (n=1) to the increasingly complex and structured expressions (1 < n < 10) offers a transversal axis of study to the classical differentiations that ordinarily structure linguistics: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and so on. The thesis explores the quantitative and qualitative diversity of phenomena at these different scales of language and develops a novel approach by proposing multi-scale measurements and formalizations, with the aim of characterizing more fundamental structural aspects of the studied phenomena.

EPFL2017

Studying Linguistic Changes over 200 Years of Newspapers through Resilient Words Analysis

Cyril Antoine Michel Bornet, Vincent Christian Buntinx, Frédéric Kaplan

This paper presents a methodology to analyze linguistic changes in a given textual corpus allowing to overcome two common problems related to corpus linguistics studies. One of these issues is the monotonic increase of the corpus size with time, and the other one is the presence of noise in the textual data. In addition, our method allows to better target the linguistic evolution of the corpus, instead of other aspects like noise fluctuation or topics evolution. A corpus formed by two newspapers “La Gazette de Lausanne” and “Le Journal de Genève” is used, providing 4 million articles from 200 years of archives. We first perform some classical measurements on this corpus in order to provide indicators and visualizations of linguistic evolution. We then define the concept of a lexical kernel and word resilience, to face the two challenges of noises and corpus size fluctuations. This paper ends with a discussion based on the comparison of results from linguistic change analysis and concludes with possible future works continuing in that direction.

2017

Analyse multi-échelle de n-grammes sur 200 années d'archives de presse

Vincent Christian Buntinx

EPFL2017