Globalization, Security, Paradox: Towards a Refugee Biopolitics

How can we think, imagine, and make authoritative claims about contemporary refugee politics? I believe this question must precede investigations into struggles/movements advocating rights and political voice for refugees. It is important to come to terms with the changing terrain of refugee politics, in order to (re)conceptualize it and provide some idea of how/where such struggles might be fought. Focusing on the colliding commitments to globalization and security, particularly since September 11, 2001, I argue that “paradox” is a core element of refugee politics. To some extent, this has been rehearsed elsewhere, and I point to the highlights in the existing literature. I suggest that an approach sensitive to Foucault’s account of governmentality and biopolitics is particularly helpful, stressing the diffuse networks of power in refugee politics among private and public actors, the increasing role of “biotechnology,” and some (re)solution to the globalization – domestic security paradox, leading to what I call the “biopoliticization of refugee politics.” Examined here are the politics of asylum and refugee movements in the UK. In particular, the 2002 government White Paper on immigration and asylum – Secure Borders, Safe Haven – provides an example of the changing terrain of contemporary (post-September 11) refugee (bio)politics.Comment pouvons-nous arriver à penser, à formuler et à adopter des positions qui fassent autorité sur les politiques du droit d’asile aujourd’hui? Je suis d’opinion que cette question doit précéder tout examen des luttes et des mouvements qui militent pour des droits et une voix au chapitre (politique) pour les réfugiés. Il est important d’être bien au fait du paysage changeant des enjeux politiques entourant le droit d’asile, afin de pouvoir le re-conceptualiser et fournir une idée de comment et où de telles luttes doivent être menées. Me concentrant sur les objectifs opposés de la globalisation et de la sécurité, tout spécialement après le 11 septembre, je propose que le « paradoxe » est un élément clé de la politique sur le droit d’asile. Dans une certaine mesure, cela a déjà été décrit ailleurs, et je souligne donc les passages importants dans la littérature existante. Je suggère qu’une approche qui serait ouverte à la thèse de Foucault sur la « gouvernementalité » et la bio-politique est particulièrement utile, soulignant le réseau de pouvoir diffuse qui existe dans les enjeux politiques autour du droit d’asile parmi les protagonistes dans les secteurs privés et publics, le rôle grandissant de la bio technologie et quelques solutions du paradoxe globalisation et sécurité intérieure, et menant à ce que j’appelle la « bio-politisation des enjeux politiques du droit d’asile ». Nous examinons ici la politique du droit d’asile et les mouvements de défense des réfugiés en Grande Bretagne. Le livre blanc de 2002 sur l’immigration et le droit d’asile, intitulé « Secure Borders, Safe Haven » (‘Frontières sécurisées, havre de paix’), illustre bien les changements qui s’opèrent dans le paysage de la (bio) politique contemporaine (post 11 septembre) sur le droit d’asile

Establishing a New State-of-the-Art for French Named Entity Recognition

The French TreeBank developed at the University Paris 7 is the main source of morphosyntactic and syntactic annotations for French. However, it does not include explicit information related to named entities, which are among the most useful information for several natural language processing tasks and applications. Moreover, no large-scale French corpus with named entity annotations contain referential information, which complement the type and the span of each mention with an indication of the entity it refers to. We have manually annotated the French TreeBank with such information, after an automatic pre-annotation step. We sketch the underlying annotation guidelines and we provide a few figures about the resulting annotations

Application of Ewald's Method for Efficient Summation of Dyon Long-Range Potentials

We study a model of dyons for SU(2) Yang-Mills theory at finite temperature T < T_c, in particular its ability to generate a confining force between a static quark antiquark pair. The interaction between dyons corresponds to a long-range 1/r potential, which in naive treatments with a finite number of dyons typically gives rise to severe finite volume effects. To avoid such effects we apply the so-called Ewald method, which has its origin in solid state physics. The basic idea of Ewald's method is to consider a finite number of dyons inside a finite cubic volume and enforce periodicity of this volume. We explain the technicalities of Ewald's method and outline how the method can be applied to a wider class of 1/r^p long-range potentials.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, contribution to conference "Confinement X

Unsupervised Learning for Handling Code-Mixed Data: A Case Study on POS Tagging of North-African Arabizi Dialect

International audienceLanguage model pretrained representation are now ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing. In this work, we present some first results in adapting those models to Out-of-Domain textual data. Using Part-of-Speech tagging as our case study, we analyze the ability of BERT to model a complex North-African Dialect (Arabizi). What is Arabizi ? BERT and Arabizi We do our experiments on the released base multilingual version of BERT (Delvin et al. 2018) which was trained on a concatenation of Wikipedia of 104 languages. BERT has never seen any Arabizi. It is visible that Arabizi is related to French in BERT's embedding space Summary • Multilingual-BERT can be used to build a decent Part-of-Speech Tagger with a reasonable amount of annotated data • Unsupervised adaptation improves (+1) performance in downstream POS tagging Research questions • Is BERT able to model Out-of-Domain languages such as Arabizi ? • Can we adapt BERT in an unsupervised way to Arabizi ? Definitions • Dialectal Arabic is a variation of Classic Arabic that varies from one region to another that is spoken orally only. Darija is the one spoken in Maghreb (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco). • Arabizi is the name given to the transliterated language of dialectal Arabic in Latin script mostly found online. Key Property : High Variability • No spelling, morphological or syntactic fixed norms • Strong influence from foreign languages • Code-Switching French / Darija Unsupervised Fine Tuning of BERT on Arabizi We fine-tune BERT (MLM objective) on the 200k Arabizi sentences Results Collecting and filtering raw Arabizi Data We bootstrap a data set for Arabizi starting from 9000 sentences collected by Cotterell et al. (2014). Using keywords scraping, we collect 1 million UGC sentences comprising French, English and Arabizi. We filter 200k Arabizi sentences out of the raw corpus (94% F1 score) using our language identifier (cf. Figure below). Lexical Normalization We train a clustering lexical normalizer using edit and word2vec distances. This degrades downstream performances in POS tagging. A new Treebank The first bottleneck in analyzing such a dialect is the lack of annotated resources. We developed a CoNLL-U Treebank** that includes Part-of-Speech, dependencies, and the translations of 1500 sentences (originally posted in Facebook, Echorouk newspaper…). Model Accuracy Baseline (udpipe) 73.7 Baseline + Normalization (udpipe) 72.4 BERT + POS tuning 77.3 BERT + POS tuning + Normalization (udpipe) 69.9 BERT + Unsupervised Domain fine tuning+ POS tuning 78.3 Final performance. Accuracy reported on the test set averaged over 5 runs Figure 2 : Validation accuracy while fine tuning BERT on Arabizi data (200k sentence) X1000 iteration Accuracy Masked Language Model French Wikipedia Arabizi vive mca w nchalah had l'3am championi Arabizi long live MCA and I hope that this year we will be champions Englis

Can Multilingual Language Models Transfer to an Unseen Dialect? A Case Study on North African Arabizi

Building natural language processing systems for non standardized and low resource languages is a difficult challenge. The recent success of large-scale multilingual pretrained language models provides new modeling tools to tackle this. In this work, we study the ability of multilingual language models to process an unseen dialect. We take user generated North-African Arabic as our case study, a resource-poor dialectal variety of Arabic with frequent code-mixing with French and written in Arabizi, a non-standardized transliteration of Arabic to Latin script. Focusing on two tasks, part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing, we show in zero-shot and unsupervised adaptation scenarios that multilingual language models are able to transfer to such an unseen dialect, specifically in two extreme cases: (i) across scripts, using Modern Standard Arabic as a source language, and (ii) from a distantly related language, unseen during pretraining, namely Maltese. Our results constitute the first successful transfer experiments on this dialect, paving thus the way for the development of an NLP ecosystem for resource-scarce, non-standardized and highly variable vernacular languages

Track Initiation of Low-Earth-Orbit Objects using Statistical Modeling of Sparse Observations

International audienceIn this paper, we investigate a new track initiation technique enabling the use of a low-cost radar system for Low-Earth-Orbit surveillance. This technique is based on a first association of observations with little ambiguity followed by a fast Initial Orbit Determination. This study supports the feasibility of the system as this technique shows a coverage of 84,4% within 6 days, with a combinatorial complexity kept under control when assessed in a realistic multitarget tracking context