Section: New Results

Discovering correlations between parser features and neurological observations

Participants : Éric Villemonte de La Clergerie, Murielle Fabre, Pauline Brunet.

In the context of the CRCNS international network, the ANR-NSF NCM-ML project (dubbed “Petit Prince project”) aims to discover and explore correlations between features (or predictors) provided by NLP tools such as parsers, and fMRI data resulting from listening of the novel Le Petit Prince.

In 2018, Pauline Brunet, during her Master thesis, has worked on developing the infrastructure (scripts and formats) for the integration of the features, and the use of these features for computing correlations with fMRI data. A first set of features has been identified and collected from the novel and from its processing by ALMAnaCH tools (namely FRMG as an instance of a symbolic TAG-based parser and Dyalog-SR, as an instance of an hybrid feature-based neural-based dependency parser). A first dataset of fMRI scan was received to assess the infrastructure and get some preliminary results.

The work is now being continued with the arrival as a post-doc of Murielle Fabre (November 2018). With the expected arrival of the second half of the scans, she will explore more features, use her expertise to interpret the correlations, and guide the choice of new features to be tested. Since her arrival, she has in particular focused on Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs), in particular to be comparable with results published on the English side of the project. We have also identified several kinds of parsing architectures to test, in relation with various complexity parameters: (1) LSTM (two layers), (2) RNNG (with a partile filter), (3) Dyalog-SR et (4) FRMG (TAG).

In order to be in phase (and comparable) with our US partners, we have started to assemble two French corpora: - a small corpus for domain adaptation to children’s books: it will permit the fine tuning of the different parsers to a great amount of dialogues an Q&A present in Le Petit Prince. - a large corpus of Contemporary French oral transcriptions and texts to calculate lexical association measures (AM) like PMI (Point-wise Mutual information) or Dice scores on the MWEs found in Le Petit Prince. This corpus of approx. 600 millions words represents a balanced counterpart to the American COCA corpus. (https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/)

Both Éric de La Clergerie and Murielle Fabre attended the annual meeting of the CRCNS network (Berkeley, June 2018).