Publications related to Second language

Driving and suppressing the human language network using large language models

Transformer models such as GPT generate human-like language and are predictive of human brain responses to language. Here, using functional-MRI-measured brain responses to 1,000 diverse sentences, we first show that a GPT-based encoding model can predict t ...

Nature Portfolio2024

The conceptual foundations of innate immunity: Taking stock 30 years later

Bruno Lemaitre

While largely neglected over decades during which adaptive immunity captured most of the attention, innate immune mechanisms have now become central to our understanding of immunology. Innate immunity provides the first barrier to infection in vertebrates, ...

2024

Type-Preserving Compilation of Class-Based Languages

Guillaume André Fradji Martres

The Dependent Object Type (DOT) calculus was designed to put Scala on a sound basis, but while DOT relies on structural subtyping, Scala is a fundamentally class-based language. This impedance mismatch means that a proof of DOT soundness by itself is ...

EPFL2023

Towards Novel Evaluation Methods for Social Dialog Systems

Ekaterina Svikhnushina

Language has shaped human evolution and led to the desire to endow machines with language abilities. Recent advancements in natural language processing enable us to achieve this breakthrough in human-machine interaction. However, introducing conversational ...

EPFL2023

Empathetic Conversational Agents for Distress Support

Kalpani Anuradha Welivita

Due to the increasing demands of today's fast-paced world, mental health concerns are on the rise, which necessitates innovative approaches to provide support to those in need. Open-domain conversational agents known as chatbots, offer a unique opportunit ...

EPFL2023

Kinesthetic motor-imagery training improves performance on lexical-semantic access

Sylvain Jean-François Harquel, Camille Bonnet

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of Motor Imagery (MI) training on language comprehension. In line with literature suggesting an intimate relationship between the language and the motor system, we proposed that a MI-training could imp ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2022

Social/dialogical roles of social robots in supporting children's learning of language and literacy-A review and analysis of innovative roles

Barbara Bruno

One of the many purposes for which social robots are designed is education, and there have been many attempts to systematize their potential in this field. What these attempts have in common is the recognition that learning can be supported in a variety of ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Bias at a Second Glance: A Deep Dive into Bias for German Educational Peer-Review Data Modeling

Vinitra Swamy, Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Thiemo Wambsganss

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become increasingly utilized to provide adaptivity in educational applications. However, recent research has highlighted a variety of biases in pre-trained language models. While existing studies investigate bias in di ...

2022

PARSINLU: A Suite of Language Understanding Challenges for Persian

Rabeeh Karimi Mahabadi

Despite the progress made in recent years in addressing natural language understanding (NLU) challenges, the majority of this progress remains to be concentrated on resource-rich languages like English. This work focuses on Persian language, one of the wid ...

2021

What is Trending on Wikipedia? Capturing Trends and Language Biases Across Wikipedia Editions

Pierre Vandergheynst, Nicolas Aspert, Volodymyr Miz, Benjamin Ricaud, Joëlle Hanna

In this work, we propose an automatic evaluation and comparison of the browsing behavior of Wikipedia readers that can be applied to any language editions of Wikipedia. As an example, we focus on English, French, and Russian languages during the last four ...

ACM2020

Multilingual and Unsupervised Subword Modeling for Zero-Resource Languages

Enno Hermann

Subword modeling for zero-resource languages aims to learn low-level representations of speech audio without using transcriptions or other resources from the target language (such as text corpora or pronunciation dictionaries). A good representation should ...

2021

Automated Essay Scoring in Foreign Language Students Based on Deep Contextualised Word Representations

Martin Jaggi, Bojana Rankovic

We introduce a method for automated grading of handwritten essays written by foreign language learners of French. The handwriting recognition system allows digitising the essays for further processing and functions at a low character error rate. The transc ...

2020

The Unstoppable Rise of Computational Linguistics in Deep Learning

James Henderson

In this paper, we trace the history of neural networks applied to natural language understanding tasks, and identify key contributions which the nature of language has made to the development of neural network architectures. We focus on the importance of v ...

Association for Computational Linguistics2020

A Comparison of Social Robot to Tablet and Teacher in a New Script Learning Context

Pierre Dillenbourg, Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal

This research occurred in a special context where Kazakhstan's recent decision to switch from Cyrillic to the Latin-based alphabet has resulted in challenges connected to teaching literacy, addressing a rare combination of research hypotheses and technical ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2020

Learning (Good Handwriting In Greek) By Teaching (A Humanoid Robot)

Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal, Thanasis Hadzilacos

We report on a follow-up study of the Co-Writer project at EPFL [1]; we confirm their findings, extend the applicability to another language with a different alphabet (Greek) and go into an in-depth qualitative study of the child-robot relationship. The co ...

IATED-INT ASSOC TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION & DEVELOPMENT2020

Negentropic linguistic evolution: A comparison of seven languages

Frédéric Kaplan, Vincent Christian Buntinx

The relationship between the entropy of language and its complexity has been the subject of much speculation – some seeing the increase of linguistic entropy as a sign of linguistic complexification or interpreting entropy drop as a marker of greater regul ...

Red de Humanidades Digitales A. C.2018

Cross-Platform Language Design in Scala.js (Keynote)

Sébastien Jean R Doeraene

Have you ever wondered what is the secret sauce of Scala.js? What defines Scala.js, above all else, is the overarching will to make it cross-platform. A cross-platform language is both portable-most source code cross-compiles and behaves the same way on mu ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018

Spatial: A Language and Compiler for Application Accelerators

Christos Kozyrakis, Yunqi Zhang

Industry is increasingly turning to reconfigurable architectures like FPGAs and CGRAs for improved performance and energy efficiency. Unfortunately, adoption of these architectures has been limited by their programming models. HDLs lack abstractions for pr ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2018

Design and implementation of an optimizing type-centric compiler for a high-level language

Dmytro Petrashko

Production compilers for programming languages face multiple requirements. They should be correct, as we rely on them to produce code. They should be fast, in order to provide a good developer experience. They should also be easy to maintain and evolve. Th ...

EPFL2017

The Number of Genomic Copies at the 16p11.2 Locus Modulates Language, Verbal Memory, and Inhibition

Nouchine Hadjikhani, Bogdan Draganski, Loyse Hippolyte, Borja Rodriguez Herreros

BACKGROUND: Deletions and duplications of the 16p11.2 BP4-BP5 locus are prevalent copy number variations (CNVs), highly associated with autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia. Beyond language and global cognition, neuropsychological assessments of thes ...

Elsevier Science Inc2016