Combien d'accents en français? Focus sur la France, la Belgique et la Suisse

Two experiments are reported, an accent identification test and a survey aiming at mapping pronunciation variants in European French. The results of the first experiment show that French varieties spoken in Quebec and Paris (supposed to represent the norm) are identified best, before the Maghrebian accent. In Europe, southern accents are rather well distinguished from northern French, Belgian and Swiss accents. In the second experiment, which focuses on the quality of mid vowels and the pronunciation of final consonants, a clear North-South divide is shown. The pronunciation of some words also distinguishes Belgian and Swiss accents. Despite a certain discrepancy between production and perception, we hypothesise that 8 accents may be considered in European French: North, East, West, South-East and South-West of France, Corsica, Belgium and Switzerland

Comparaison de trois outils de détection automatique de proéminences en français parlé

This paper presents the inner details of three differentalgorithms for prominence detection. On the basis of a 50-minute corpus made of five speaking styles and manuallyannotated for prominence, a quantitative evaluationcompares the three approaches

The Impact of the June 4th Massacre on the pro-Democracy Movement

The Chinese pro-democracy movement crushed by the People’s Liberation Army on 4 June 1989 was preceded by many protests by intellectuals. The crackdown deprived the democrats of their protectors in the Party, and forced them to change strategies. Unable to organise large-scale demonstrations, dissidents launched petitions demanding respect for human rights and reversal of the official verdict on June 4th. They were joined by the Tiananmen Mothers, who became a new force in the pro-democracy movement. Yet, China’s democracy activists remain largely isolated from the rest of society

L'impact du massacre du 4 juin sur le mouvement démocratique

Le mouvement pour la démocratie réprimé dans le sang par l’armée le 4 juin 1989 a été précédé par de nombreux mouvements de critiques animés par des intellectuels. Le massacre a privé les démocrates de leurs protecteurs au sein du Parti, et les a contraints à changer de stratégie. Dans l’incapacité d’organiser des manifestations à grande échelle, les dissidents ont choisi de lancer des pétitions pour réclamer le respect des droits de l’homme et le renversement du verdict sur le 4 juin. Ils ont été rejoints par les Mères de Tiananmen, un groupe qui, au fil des ans, est devenu une composante importante du mouvement pour la démocratie

FRASIMED: a Clinical French Annotated Resource Produced through Crosslingual BERT-Based Annotation Projection

Natural language processing (NLP) applications such as named entity recognition (NER) for low-resource corpora do not benefit from recent advances in the development of large language models (LLMs) where there is still a need for larger annotated datasets. This research article introduces a methodology for generating translated versions of annotated datasets through crosslingual annotation projection. Leveraging a language agnostic BERT-based approach, it is an efficient solution to increase low-resource corpora with few human efforts and by only using already available open data resources. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations are often lacking when it comes to evaluating the quality and effectiveness of semi-automatic data generation strategies. The evaluation of our crosslingual annotation projection approach showed both effectiveness and high accuracy in the resulting dataset. As a practical application of this methodology, we present the creation of French Annotated Resource with Semantic Information for Medical Entities Detection (FRASIMED), an annotated corpus comprising 2'051 synthetic clinical cases in French. The corpus is now available for researchers and practitioners to develop and refine French natural language processing (NLP) applications in the clinical field (https://zenodo.org/record/8355629), making it the largest open annotated corpus with linked medical concepts in French

Rhapsodie: a Prosodic-Syntactic Treebank for Spoken French

International audienceThe main objective of the Rhapsodie project (ANR Rhapsodie 07 Corp-030-01) was to define rich, explicit, and reproducible schemes for the annotation of prosody and syntax in different genres (± spontaneous, ± planned, face-to-face interviews vs. broadcast, etc.), in order to study the prosody/syntax/discourse interface in spoken French, and their roles in the segmentation of speech into discourse units (Lacheret, Kahane, & Pietrandrea forthcoming). We here describe the deliverable, a syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French, composed of 57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and 33000 words), orthographically and phonetically transcribed. The transcriptions and the annotations are all aligned on the speech signal: phonemes, syllables, words, speakers, overlaps. This resource is freely available at www.projet-rhapsodie.fr. The sound samples (wav/mp3), the acoustic analysis (original F0 curve manually corrected and automatic stylized F0, pitch format), the orthographic transcriptions (txt), the microsyntactic annotations (tabular format), the macrosyntactic annotations (txt, tabular format), the prosodic annotations (xml, textgrid, tabular format), and the metadata (xml and html) can be freely downloaded under the terms of the Creative Commons licence Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 France. The metadata are encoded in the IMDI-CMFI format and can be parsed on line