Phonetic normalization as a means to improve toxicity detection

À travers le temps et en présence des avancements de la technologie, l'utilisation de cette technologie afin de créer et de maintenir des communautés en ligne est devenue une occurrence journalière. Avec l'augmentation de l'utilisation de ces technologies, une tendance négative peut aussi se faire identifier; il y a une quantité croissante d'utilisateurs ayant des objectifs négatifs qui créent du contenu illicite ou nuisible à ces communautés. Afin de protéger ces communautés, il devient donc nécessaire de modérer les communications des communautés. Bien qu'il serait possible d'engager une équipe de modérateurs, cette équipe devrait constamment grandir afin de pouvoir modérer l'entièreté du contenu. Afin de résoudre ce problème, plusieurs se tournent vers des techniques de modération automatique. Deux exemples de techniques sont les "whitelists" et les "blacklists". Malheureusement, les utilisateurs néfastes peuvent facilement contourner ces techniques à l'aide de techniques subversives. Une des techniques populaires est l'utilisation de substitution où un utilisateur remplace un mot par un équivalent phonétique, ou une combinaison visuellement semblable au mot original. À travers ce mémoire, nous offrons une nouvelle technique de normalisation faisant usage de la phonétique à l'intérieur d'un normalisateur de texte. Ce normalisateur recrée la prononciation et infère le mot réel à partir de cette normalisation, l'objectif étant de retirer les signes de subversion. Une fois normalisé, un message peut ensuite être passé aux systèmes de classification.Over time, the presence of online communities and the use of electronic means of communication have and keep becoming more prevalent. With this increase, the presence of users making use of those means to spread and create harmful, or sometimes known as toxic, content has also increased. In order to protect those communities, the need for moderation becomes a critical matter. While it could be possible to hire a team of moderators, this team would have to be ever-growing, and as such, most turn to automatic means of detection as a step in their moderation process. Examples of such automatic means would be the use of methods such as blacklists and whitelists, but those methods can easily be subverted by harmful users. A common subversion technique is the substitution of a complete word by a phonetically similar word, or combination of letters that resembles the intended word. This thesis aims to offer a novel approach to moderation specifically targeting phonetic substitutions by creating a normalizer capable of identifying how a word should be read and inferring the obfuscated word, nullifying the effects of subversion. Once normalized phonetically, the messages are then sent to existing means of classification for automatic moderation

Temporal integration in the perception of speech: Introduction

International audienceIn studies of speech perception, temporal integration refers to how chunks of information arriving at the ears at different times are linked together by the listener in mapping speech sounds onto meaning. Classical models focused on the perceptual grouping of acoustic cues contained in short stretches of time in the identification of phonetic segments. In recent years, however, a different view has emerged as speech perception has come to be studied within a broader context and from a multidisciplinary perspective. Thus, the relevance of non-local, long-domain cues to phonological contrasts has been demonstrated. The status of the phonetic segment as a basic perceptual unit has been debated. And the primacy of the auditory channel over the visual channel has been questioned. These issues have profound implications for how temporal integration is defined and accounted for

Accent processing in dementia

Accented speech conveys important nonverbal information about the speaker as well as presenting the brain with the problem of decoding a non-canonical auditory signal. The processing of non-native accents has seldom been studied in neurodegenerative disease and its brain basis remains poorly understood. Here we investigated the processing of non-native international and regional accents of English in cohorts of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD; n=20) and progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA; n=6) in relation to healthy older control subjects (n=35). A novel battery was designed to assess accent comprehension and recognition and all subjects had a general neuropsychological assessment. Neuroanatomical associations of accent processing performance were assessed using voxel-based morphometry on MR brain images within the larger AD group. Compared with healthy controls, both the AD and PNFA groups showed deficits of non-native accent recognition and the PNFA group showed reduced comprehension of words spoken in international accents compared with a Southern English accent. At individual subject level deficits were observed more consistently in the PNFA group, and the disease groups showed different patterns of accent comprehension impairment (generally more marked for sentences in AD and for single words in PNFA). Within the AD group, grey matter associations of accent comprehension and recognition were identified in the anterior superior temporal lobe. The findings suggest that accent processing deficits may constitute signatures of neurodegenerative disease with potentially broader implications for understanding how these diseases affect vocal communication under challenging listening conditions

Temporal integration in the perception of speech: Introduction

International audienceIn studies of speech perception, temporal integration refers to how chunks of information arriving at the ears at different times are linked together by the listener in mapping speech sounds onto meaning. Classical models focused on the perceptual grouping of acoustic cues contained in short stretches of time in the identification of phonetic segments. In recent years, however, a different view has emerged as speech perception has come to be studied within a broader context and from a multidisciplinary perspective. Thus, the relevance of non-local, long-domain cues to phonological contrasts has been demonstrated. The status of the phonetic segment as a basic perceptual unit has been debated. And the primacy of the auditory channel over the visual channel has been questioned. These issues have profound implications for how temporal integration is defined and accounted for

Neurocognitive signatures of phonemic sequencing in expert backward speakers

Despite its prolific growth, neurolinguistic research on phonemic sequencing has largely neglected the study of individuals with highly developed skills in this domain. To bridge this gap, we report multidimensional signatures of two experts in backward speech, that is, the capacity to produce utterances by reversing the order of phonemes while retaining their identity. Our approach included behavioral assessments of backward and forward speech alongside neuroimaging measures of voxel-based morphometry, diffusion tensor imaging, and resting-state functional connectivity. Relative to controls, both backward speakers exhibited behavioral advantages for reversing words and sentences of varying complexity, irrespective of working memory skills. These patterns were accompanied by increased grey matter volume, higher mean diffusivity, and enhanced functional connectivity along dorsal and ventral stream regions mediating phonological and other linguistic operations, with complementary support of areas subserving associative-visual and domain-general processes. Still, the specific loci of these neural patterns differed between both subjects, suggesting individual variability in the correlates of expert backward speech. Taken together, our results offer new vistas on the domain of phonemic sequencing, while illuminating neuroplastic patterns underlying extraordinary language abilities