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Marie-Jean Meurs

Publications and source records attributed to Marie-Jean Meurs.

11 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

AI translation of literary texts is "fine", but readers still prefer human translations

AI translation of literary works is increasingly common. While the content may be rendered adequately, we do not know enough about how readers experience it in terms of immersiveness and literary effect-aspects poorly captured by automatic metrics or human evaluation targeting fluency and adequacy. We ask 15 avid readers to compare recently published human translations (HT) to machine translations (MT) generated with an agentic language model-based pipeline, for 15 recent novels in French, Polish, and Japanese translated into English. Readers evaluated approximately 8K-word excerpts in two conditions: immersive reading of the whole excerpt (30 comparisons) and close reading of 386 aligned HT-MT chunk pairs (772 comparisons), with two readers per book. Overall, readers find MT "fine", but prefer HT (descriptively at the excerpt level, 19/30, and significantly at the chunk level, 522/772) for its ease, clarity, and immersive nature. Readers' highlights show that MT's quality varies more within one book than HT's does. Crucially, readers cannot reliably tell the two apart (17/30 guess correctly) and tend to prefer the version they believe to be human. Automatic metrics, including LLM-as-a-judge approaches, fail to recover reader preferences and favor MT. We release LAIT (Literary AI Translation), a reader-centered evaluation dataset with 1K reader comments, 2K judgments and preference ratings, and 7.2K span-level annotations, along with our evaluation protocol and supporting interface.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2023

Adversarial Adaptation for French Named Entity Recognition

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying and classifying named entities in large-scale texts into predefined classes. NER in French and other relatively limited-resource languages cannot always benefit from approaches proposed for languages like English due to a dearth of large, robust datasets. In this paper, we present our work that aims to mitigate the effects of this dearth of large, labeled datasets. We propose a Transformer-based NER approach for French, using adversarial adaptation to similar domain or general corpora to improve feature extraction and enable better generalization. Our approach allows learning better features using large-scale unlabeled corpora from the same domain or mixed domains to introduce more variations during training and reduce overfitting. Experimental results on three labeled datasets show that our adaptation framework outperforms the corresponding non-adaptive models for various combinations of Transformer models, source datasets, and target corpora. We also show that adversarial adaptation to large-scale unlabeled corpora can help mitigate the performance dip incurred on using Transformer models pre-trained on smaller corpora.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2022

Personalized Student Attribute Inference

Accurately predicting their future performance can ensure students successful graduation, and help them save both time and money. However, achieving such predictions faces two challenges, mainly due to the diversity of students' background and the necessity of continuously tracking their evolving progress. The goal of this work is to create a system able to automatically detect students in difficulty, for instance predicting if they are likely to fail a course. We compare a naive approach widely used in the literature, which uses attributes available in the data set (like the grades), with a personalized approach we called Personalized Student Attribute Inference (PSAI). With our model, we create personalized attributes to capture the specific background of each student. Both approaches are compared using machine learning algorithms like decision trees, support vector machine or neural networks.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2022

Transformer-Based Named Entity Recognition for French Using Adversarial Adaptation to Similar Domain Corpora

Named Entity Recognition (NER) involves the identification and classification of named entities in unstructured text into predefined classes. NER in languages with limited resources, like French, is still an open problem due to the lack of large, robust, labelled datasets. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based NER approach for French using adversarial adaptation to similar domain or general corpora for improved feature extraction and better generalization. We evaluate our approach on three labelled datasets and show that our adaptation framework outperforms the corresponding non-adaptive models for various combinations of transformer models, source datasets and target corpora.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2022

Quick Starting Dialog Systems with Paraphrase Generation

Acquiring training data to improve the robustness of dialog systems can be a painstakingly long process. In this work, we propose a method to reduce the cost and effort of creating new conversational agents by artificially generating more data from existing examples, using paraphrase generation. Our proposed approach can kick-start a dialog system with little human effort, and brings its performance to a level satisfactory enough for allowing actual interactions with real end-users. We experimented with two neural paraphrasing approaches, namely Neural Machine Translation and a Transformer-based seq2seq model. We present the results obtained with two datasets in English and in French:~a crowd-sourced public intent classification dataset and our own corporate dialog system dataset. We show that our proposed approach increased the generalization capabilities of the intent classification model on both datasets, reducing the effort required to initialize a new dialog system and helping to deploy this technology at scale within an organization.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2021

An Iterative Contextualization Algorithm with Second-Order Attention

Combining the representations of the words that make up a sentence into a cohesive whole is difficult, since it needs to account for the order of words, and to establish how the words present relate to each other. The solution we propose consists in iteratively adjusting the context. Our algorithm starts with a presumably erroneous value of the context, and adjusts this value with respect to the tokens at hand. In order to achieve this, representations of words are built combining their symbolic embedding with a positional encoding into single vectors. The algorithm then iteratively weighs and aggregates these vectors using our novel second-order attention mechanism. Our models report strong results in several well-known text classification tasks.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2019

Multiplicative Models for Recurrent Language Modeling

Recently, there has been interest in multiplicative recurrent neural networks for language modeling. Indeed, simple Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) encounter difficulties recovering from past mistakes when generating sequences due to high correlation between hidden states. These challenges can be mitigated by integrating second-order terms in the hidden-state update. One such model, multiplicative Long Short-Term Memory (mLSTM) is particularly interesting in its original formulation because of the sharing of its second-order term, referred to as the intermediate state. We explore these architectural improvements by introducing new models and testing them on character-level language modeling tasks. This allows us to establish the relevance of shared parametrization in recurrent language modeling.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2019

Inter and Intra Document Attention for Depression Risk Assessment

We take interest in the early assessment of risk for depression in social media users. We focus on the eRisk 2018 dataset, which represents users as a sequence of their written online contributions. We implement four RNN-based systems to classify the users. We explore several aggregations methods to combine predictions on individual posts. Our best model reads through all writings of a user in parallel but uses an attention mechanism to prioritize the most important ones at each timestep.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2017

Independently Controllable Factors

It has been postulated that a good representation is one that disentangles the underlying explanatory factors of variation. However, it remains an open question what kind of training framework could potentially achieve that. Whereas most previous work focuses on the static setting (e.g., with images), we postulate that some of the causal factors could be discovered if the learner is allowed to interact with its environment. The agent can experiment with different actions and observe their effects. More specifically, we hypothesize that some of these factors correspond to aspects of the environment which are independently controllable, i.e., that there exists a policy and a learnable feature for each such aspect of the environment, such that this policy can yield changes in that feature with minimal changes to other features that explain the statistical variations in the observed data. We propose a specific objective function to find such factors and verify experimentally that it can indeed disentangle independently controllable aspects of the environment without any extrinsic reward signal.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2007

Approche polyedrale pour le probleme du separateur (VSP)

In an undirected connected graph G=(V,E), the vertex separator problem (VSP) asks for a partition of V into nonempty subsets A, B, C such that |C| is minimized such that there is no edge between A and B, and sizes of A and B are similar. This paper presents a polyhedral approach of the (VSP), introducing new efficient valid inequalities and providing computational tests and results.

cs.DM↗