Agro-STAY : Collecte de données et analyse des informations en agriculture alternative issues de YouTube

To address the current crises (climatic, social, economic), the self-sufficiency -- a set of practices that combine energy sobriety, self-production of food and energy, and self-construction - arouses an increasing interest. The CNRS STAY project (Savoirs Techniques pour l'Auto-suffisance, sur YouTube) explores this topic by analyzing techniques shared on YouTube. We present Agro-STAY, a platform designed for the collection, processing, and visualization of data from YouTube videos and their comments. We use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and language models, which enable a fine-grained analysis of alternative agricultural practice described online. -- Face aux crises actuelles (climatiques, sociales, \'economiques), l'auto-suffisance -- ensemble de pratiques combinant sobri\'et\'e \'energ\'etique, autoproduction alimentaire et \'energ\'etique et autoconstruction - suscite un int\'er\^et croissant. Le projet CNRS STAY (Savoirs Techniques pour l'Auto-suffisance, sur YouTube) s'inscrit dans ce domaine en analysant les savoirs techniques diffus\'es sur YouTube. Nous pr\'esentons Agro-STAY, une plateforme d\'edi\'ee \`a la collecte, au traitement et \`a la visualisation de donn\'ees issues de vid\'eos YouTube et de leurs commentaires. En mobilisant des techniques de traitement automatique des langues (TAL) et des mod\`eles de langues, ce travail permet une analyse fine des pratiques agricoles alternatives d\'ecrites en ligne.

Evaluation of Geographical Distortions in Language Models: A Crucial Step Towards Equitable Representations

Language models now constitute essential tools for improving efficiency for many professional tasks such as writing, coding, or learning. For this reason, it is imperative to identify inherent biases. In the field of Natural Language Processing, five sources of bias are well-identified: data, annotation, representation, models, and research design. This study focuses on biases related to geographical knowledge. We explore the connection between geography and language models by highlighting their tendency to misrepresent spatial information, thus leading to distortions in the representation of geographical distances. This study introduces four indicators to assess these distortions, by comparing geographical and semantic distances. Experiments are conducted from these four indicators with ten widely used language models. Results underscore the critical necessity of inspecting and rectifying spatial biases in language models to ensure accurate and equitable representations.

An evaluation framework for comparing epidemic intelligence systems

In the context of Epidemic Intelligence, many Event-Based Surveillance (EBS) systems have been proposed in the literature to promote the early identification and characterization of potential health threats from online sources of any nature. Each EBS system has its own surveillance definitions and priorities, therefore this makes the task of selecting the most appropriate EBS system for a given situation a challenge for end-users. In this work, we propose a new evaluation framework to address this issue. It first transforms the raw input epidemiological event data into a set of normalized events with multi-granularity, then conducts a descriptive retrospective analysis based on four evaluation objectives: spatial, temporal, thematic and source analysis. We illustrate its relevance by applying it to an Avian Influenza dataset collected by a selection of EBS systems, and show how our framework allows identifying their strengths and drawbacks in terms of epidemic surveillance.