School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Unity and disunity in evolutionary sciences: process-based analogies open common research avenues for biology and linguistics

Abstract: Background For a long time biologists and linguists have been noticing surprising similarities between the evolution of life forms and languages. Most of the proposed analogies have been rejected. Some, however, have persisted, and some even turned out to be fruitful, inspiring the transfer of methods and models between biology and linguistics up to today. Most proposed analogies were based on a comparison of the research objects rather than the processes that shaped their evolution. Focusing on process-based analogies, however, has the advantage of minimizing the risk of overstating similarities, while at the same time reflecting the common strategy to use processes to explain the evolution of complexity in both fields. Results We compared important evolutionary processes in biology and linguistics and identified processes specific to only one of the two disciplines as well as processes which seem to be analogous, potentially reflecting core evolutionary processes. These new process-based analogies support novel methodological transfer, expanding the application range of biological methods to the field of historical linguistics. We illustrate this by showing (i) how methods dealing with incomplete lineage sorting offer an introgression-free framework to analyze highly mosaic word distributions across languages; (ii) how sequence similarity networks can be used to identify composite and borrowed words across different languages; (iii) how research on partial homology can inspire new methods and models in both fields; and (iv) how constructive neutral evolution provides an original framework for analyzing convergent evolution in languages resulting from common descent (Sapir’s drift). Conclusions Apart from new analogies between evolutionary processes, we also identified processes which are specific to either biology or linguistics. This shows that general evolution cannot be studied from within one discipline alone. In order to get a full picture of evolution, biologists and linguists need to complement their studies, trying to identify cross-disciplinary and discipline-specific evolutionary processes. The fact that we found many process-based analogies favoring transfer from biology to linguistics further shows that certain biological methods and models have a broader scope than previously recognized. This opens fruitful paths for collaboration between the two disciplines.

Sampling Strategies in Siamese Networks for Unsupervised Speech Representation Learning.

Abstract: Recent studies have investigated siamese network architectures for learning invariant speech representations using same-different side information at the word level. Here we investigate systematically an often ignored component of siamese networks: the sampling procedure (how pairs of same vs. different tokens are selected). We show that sampling strategies taking into account Zipf's Law, the distribution of speakers and the proportions of same and different pairs of words significantly impact the performance of the network. In particular, we show that word frequency compression improves learning across a large range of variations in number of training pairs. This effect does not apply to the same extent to the fully unsupervised setting, where the pairs of same-different words are obtained by spoken term discovery. We apply these results to pairs of words discovered using an unsupervised algorithm and show an improvement on state-of-the-art in unsupervised representation learning using siamese networks.

La culture de l'imago

Abstract: The Culture of the Imago. ; ; Contrary to restrictive conception of the image, the latin term imago is under stood here in all its medieval connotations : in the theological and anthropological sense of man created "ad imaginem Dei" and of the son of God incarnate presenting himself as "imago Patris"; in the sense of material image whose forms and functions are of the most diverse variety, and finally in the sense of visionary and oniric mental image. The historian relates these meanings and usages on the one hand to the evolution of society over long period from the IVth to the XVIth century, and on the other hand, with the simultaneous development of Christian conceptions about subjectivity. If devotion and liturgy during the Middle Ages are more attached to the sign of the cross than to images, veritable revolution in Christian imagery occurs between the IXth and Xth century. Starting with the millenium, the Christian culture of the imago in which the mutual relationship between cultual and devotional images and dreams and visions experienced before or under the influence of images affirms itself in all senses of the word in one of its most striking expressions. The holy images of Veronica or Volto Santo in the XIIIth century acquire universal political value. In the following centuries the contemplation of images underlies the mystical and visionary experience of monks and nuns, as well as of pious lay persons. All the threads followed in this study seem to converge in the work of Albrecht Durer, the first to paint personal dream and to resolve by the Christie experience his self-portrait the fundamental question concerning the Imago Dei.