CLApr 3
LLM-based Atomic Propositions help weak extractors: Evaluation of a Propositioner for triplet extractionLuc Pommeret, Thomas Gerald, Patrick Paroubek et al.
Knowledge Graph construction from natural language requires extracting structured triplets from complex, information-dense sentences. In this paper, we investigate if the decomposition of text into atomic propositions (minimal, semantically autonomous units of information) can improve the triplet extraction. We introduce MPropositionneur-V2, a small multilingual model covering six European languages trained by knowledge distillation from Qwen3-32B into a Qwen3-0.6B architecture, and we evaluate its integration into two extraction paradigms: entity-centric (GLiREL) and generative (Qwen3). Experiments on SMiLER, FewRel, DocRED and CaRB show that atomic propositions benefit weaker extractors (GLiREL, CoreNLP, 0.6B models), improving relation recall and, in the multilingual setting, overall accuracy. For stronger LLMs, a fallback combination strategy recovers entity recall losses while preserving the gains in relation extraction. These results show that atomic propositions are an interpretable intermediate data structure that complements extractors without replacing them.
AIApr 17, 2024Code
Small Language Models are Good Too: An Empirical Study of Zero-Shot ClassificationPierre Lepagnol, Thomas Gerald, Sahar Ghannay et al.
This study is part of the debate on the efficiency of large versus small language models for text classification by prompting.We assess the performance of small language models in zero-shot text classification, challenging the prevailing dominance of large models.Across 15 datasets, our investigation benchmarks language models from 77M to 40B parameters using different architectures and scoring functions. Our findings reveal that small models can effectively classify texts, getting on par with or surpassing their larger counterparts.We developed and shared a comprehensive open-source repository that encapsulates our methodologies. This research underscores the notion that bigger isn't always better, suggesting that resource-efficient small models may offer viable solutions for specific data classification challenges.
LGApr 7, 2020Code
Geomstats: A Python Package for Riemannian Geometry in Machine LearningNina Miolane, Alice Le Brigant, Johan Mathe et al.
We introduce Geomstats, an open-source Python toolbox for computations and statistics on nonlinear manifolds, such as hyperbolic spaces, spaces of symmetric positive definite matrices, Lie groups of transformations, and many more. We provide object-oriented and extensively unit-tested implementations. Among others, manifolds come equipped with families of Riemannian metrics, with associated exponential and logarithmic maps, geodesics and parallel transport. Statistics and learning algorithms provide methods for estimation, clustering and dimension reduction on manifolds. All associated operations are vectorized for batch computation and provide support for different execution backends, namely NumPy, PyTorch and TensorFlow, enabling GPU acceleration. This paper presents the package, compares it with related libraries and provides relevant code examples. We show that Geomstats provides reliable building blocks to foster research in differential geometry and statistics, and to democratize the use of Riemannian geometry in machine learning applications. The source code is freely available under the MIT license at \url{geomstats.ai}.
CLJun 3, 2025
Leveraging Information Retrieval to Enhance Spoken Language Understanding Prompts in Few-Shot LearningPierre Lepagnol, Sahar Ghannay, Thomas Gerald et al.
Understanding user queries is fundamental in many applications, such as home assistants, booking systems, or recommendations. Accordingly, it is crucial to develop accurate Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) approaches to ensure the reliability of the considered system. Current State-of-the-Art SLU techniques rely on large amounts of training data; however, only limited annotated examples are available for specific tasks or languages. In the meantime, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance on unseen tasks in a few-shot setting when provided with adequate prompts. In this work, we propose to explore example selection by leveraging Information retrieval (IR) approaches to build an enhanced prompt that is applied to an SLU task. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on several SLU benchmarks. Experimental results show that lexical IR methods significantly enhance performance without increasing prompt length.
IRJan 10, 2022
Continual Learning of Long Topic Sequences in Neural Information RetrievalThomas Gerald, Laure Soulier
In information retrieval (IR) systems, trends and users' interests may change over time, altering either the distribution of requests or contents to be recommended. Since neural ranking approaches heavily depend on the training data, it is crucial to understand the transfer capacity of recent IR approaches to address new domains in the long term. In this paper, we first propose a dataset based upon the MSMarco corpus aiming at modeling a long stream of topics as well as IR property-driven controlled settings. We then in-depth analyze the ability of recent neural IR models while continually learning those streams. Our empirical study highlights in which particular cases catastrophic forgetting occurs (e.g., level of similarity between tasks, peculiarities on text length, and ways of learning models) to provide future directions in terms of model design.
CLDec 8, 2021
Does Structure Matter? Leveraging Data-to-Text Generation for Answering Complex Information NeedsHanane Djeddal, Thomas Gerald, Laure Soulier et al.
In this work, our aim is to provide a structured answer in natural language to a complex information need. Particularly, we envision using generative models from the perspective of data-to-text generation. We propose the use of a content selection and planning pipeline which aims at structuring the answer by generating intermediate plans. The experimental evaluation is performed using the TREC Complex Answer Retrieval (CAR) dataset. We evaluate both the generated answer and its corresponding structure and show the effectiveness of planning-based models in comparison to a text-to-text model.
LGJul 2, 2019
From Node Embedding To Community Embedding : A Hyperbolic ApproachThomas Gerald, Hadi Zaatiti, Hatem Hajri et al.
Detecting communities on graphs has received significant interest in recent literature. Current state-of-the-art community embedding approach called \textit{ComE} tackles this problem by coupling graph embedding with community detection. Considering the success of hyperbolic representations of graph-structured data in last years, an ongoing challenge is to set up a hyperbolic approach for the community detection problem. The present paper meets this challenge by introducing a Riemannian equivalent of \textit{ComE}. Our proposed approach combines hyperbolic embeddings with Riemannian K-means or Riemannian mixture models to perform community detection. We illustrate the usefulness of this framework through several experiments on real-world social networks and comparisons with \textit{ComE} and recent hyperbolic-based classification approaches.
LGJun 24, 2019
Binary Stochastic Representations for Large Multi-class ClassificationThomas Gerald, Aurélia Léon, Nicolas Baskiotis et al.
Classification with a large number of classes is a key problem in machine learning and corresponds to many real-world applications like tagging of images or textual documents in social networks. If one-vs-all methods usually reach top performance in this context, these approaches suffer from a high inference complexity, linear w.r.t the number of categories. Different models based on the notion of binary codes have been proposed to overcome this limitation, achieving in a sublinear inference complexity. But they a priori need to decide which binary code to associate to which category before learning using more or less complex heuristics. We propose a new end-to-end model which aims at simultaneously learning to associate binary codes with categories, but also learning to map inputs to binary codes. This approach called Deep Stochastic Neural Codes (DSNC) keeps the sublinear inference complexity but do not need any a priori tuning. Experimental results on different datasets show the effectiveness of the approach w.r.t baseline methods.