Yanzhu Guo

Hadi Abdine, Yanzhu Guo, Moussa Kamal Eddine et al.

DaSciM (Data Science and Mining) part of LIX at Ecole Polytechnique, established in 2013 and since then producing research results in the area of large scale data analysis via methods of machine and deep learning. The group has been specifically active in the area of NLP and text mining with interesting results at methodological and resources level. Here follow our different contributions of interest to the AFIA community.

Yanzhu Guo, Virgile Rennard, Christos Xypolopoulos et al.

We introduce BERTweetFR, the first large-scale pre-trained language model for French tweets. Our model is initialized using the general-domain French language model CamemBERT which follows the base architecture of RoBERTa. Experiments show that BERTweetFR outperforms all previous general-domain French language models on two downstream Twitter NLP tasks of offensiveness identification and named entity recognition. The dataset used in the offensiveness detection task is first created and annotated by our team, filling in the gap of such analytic datasets in French. We make our model publicly available in the transformers library with the aim of promoting future research in analytic tasks for French tweets.

Yanzhu Guo, Christos Xypolopoulos, Michalis Vazirgiannis

Words are malleable objects, influenced by events that are reflected in written texts. Situated in the global outbreak of COVID-19, our research aims at detecting semantic shifts in social media language triggered by the health crisis. With COVID-19 related big data extracted from Twitter, we train separate word embedding models for different time periods after the outbreak. We employ an alignment-based approach to compare these embeddings with a general-purpose Twitter embedding unrelated to COVID-19. We also compare our trained embeddings among them to observe diachronic evolution. Carrying out case studies on a set of words chosen by topic detection, we verify that our alignment approach is valid. Finally, we quantify the size of global semantic shift by a stability measure based on back-and-forth rotational alignment.