Papers by Nicolas Ballier
A Manually Annotated Resource for the Investigation of Nasal Grunts (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | acoustic annotation of nasal grunts is described in the whole CID corpus of the french language . acculturation of non-lexical conversational sounds has been debated for a long time . |
| Approach: | They propose an annotation framework for nasal grunts of the whole French CID corpus . they characterise acoustic cues and visual cue conventions followed for the annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the entire French CID corpus. |
Beyond WER: Probing Whisper’s Sub‐token Decoder Across Diverse Language Resource Levels (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large multilingual automatic speech recognition models achieve remarkable performance, but the internal mechanisms of the end-to-end pipeline remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze Whisper's multilingual decoder to uncover systematic decoding disparities masked by aggregate error rates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on higher resource languages, but lower resource languages fare worse on these metrics. |
The Learnability of the Annotated Input in NMT Replicating (Vanmassenhove and Way, 2018) with OpenNMT (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | reproducibility of experiments is a key issue in Neural Networks, which are fed with variable samples of training data. |
| Approach: | They reproduce some of the experiments related to neural network training for Machine Translation as reported in . they annotated a sample from the EN-FR and EN-DE Europarl with syntactic and semantic annotations to train neural networks with the Nematus Neural Machine Translation toolkit. |
| Outcome: | The results obtained were lower than the original paper, but on a more limited set of annotations. |
Logging Keystrokes in Writing by English Learners (2024.lrec-main)
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Georgios Velentzas, Andrew Caines, Rita Borgo, Erin Pacquetet, Clive Hamilton, Taylor Arnold, Diane Nicholls, Paula Buttery, Thomas Gaillat, Nicolas Ballier, Helen Yannakoudakis
| Challenge: | Essay writing is a skill commonly taught and practised in schools. |
| Approach: | They collect and analyse data representing the essay writing process from start to finish by recording every keystroke from multiple writers participating in the study. |
| Outcome: | The data collected from 1,006 writers is compared against a standard dataset of texts, keystroke logs and metadata for public release. |