LEFORT Sébastien

ongoing PhD project at Sorbonne University
Team : LFI
https://lip6.fr/Sebastien.Lefort

Supervision : Marie-Jeanne LESOT

Co-supervision : TIJUS Charles, ZIBETTI Elisabetta

«How much is ‘about’?» Modélisation computationnelle de l’interprétation cognitive des expressions numériques approximatives

Approximate Numerical Expressions (ANE) are imprecise linguistic expressions implying numerical values, illustrated by "about 100". We first focus on ANE interpretation, both in its human and computational aspects. After defining original arithmetical and cognitive dimensions allowing to characterize ANEs, we conducted an empirical study to collect the intervals of values denoted by ANEs. We show that the proposed dimensions are involved in ANE interpretation. In a second step, we proposed two interpretation models, based on the same principle of a compromise between the cognitive salience of the endpoints and their distance to the ANE reference value, formalized by Pareto frontiers. The first model estimates the denoted interval, the second one generates a fuzzy interval representing the associated imprecision. The experimental validation of the models, based on real data, show that they offer better performances than existing models. We also show the relevance of the fuzzy model by implementing it in the framework of flexible database queries. We then show, by the mean of an empirical study, that the semantic context has little effect on the collected intervals. Finally, we focus on the additions and products of ANE, for instance to assess the area of a room whose walls are "about 10" and "about 20 meters" long. We conducted an empirical study whose results indicate that the imprecisions associated with the operands are not taken into account during the calculations.

Defence : 09/19/2017

Jury members :

BARATGIN Jean (Université Paris 8) [Rapporteur]
PIVERT Olivier (ENSSAT) [Rapporteur]
BONNEFON Jean-François (Toulouse School of Economics)
DETYNIECKI Marcin (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, LIP6)
GANASCIA Jean-Gabriel(Université Pierre et Marie Curie, LIP6)
LESOT Marie-Jeanne (Laboratoire CHArt-LUTIN)
TIJUS Charles (Laboratoire CHArt-LUTIN)
ZIBETTI Elisabetta (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, LIP6)

Departure date : 10/31/2017

2016-2017 Publications