Nicknames have been analysed, recorded and processed in many diverse ways by different languages, scholars and communities. In Zulu, many works of similar type have all been the size of an article up until 1999. This research on the subject is one of the first done in this depth. Nicknames form part of a Zulu person's daily life. They identify him/her more than the real or legal name. They shape him/her more than any other mode of address. They influence behaviour, personality, interaction based activities and the general welfare of an individual. They discipline, they praise, they mock too. Surprisingly, they are regarded as play items. They are even termed playnames (izidlaliso). But they are as serious as any item that makes an individual to be a significant figure in the community. They are unique in the sense that they stick more obstinately on the victim should he/she try to get rid of them. They are capable of staying for life. They only vanish to give others a chance to feature on the same individual. They are so poetic. A talented onomastician can tell a full story about an individual without him grabbing what is being said about him just because the story is spiced with just a single figurative nickname. They haunt the whole arena of the parts of speech in a language, especially the Zulu language. They modify the well known meaning of words into special references that paint in bright colours the character of an individual. Zulu nicknames processes visit all possible languages and adapt items from into Zuluised special terms that a capable of inheriting an onomastic status. They originate even from the most sensitive sources like people's private lives. The only challenging area about nicknames is that bearers do not want to expose them to peale who are not known to them, even if they do not fall into a category of nicknames for ridicule. Finally, nicknames have been exposed here as linguistic items that organise the community into makers and bearers, and then users of nicknames. / African Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)

Cette thèse traite de la segmentation structurelle de documents issus de cahiers de chimie. Ce travail est utile pour les chimistes en vue de prendre connaissance des conditions des expériences réalisées. Les documents traités sont manuscrits, hétérogènes et multi-scripteurs. Bien que leur structure physique soit relativement simple, une succession de trois régions représentant : la formule chimique de l’expérience, le tableau des produits utilisés et un ou plusieurs paragraphes textuels décrivant le déroulement de l’expérience, les lignes limitrophes des régions portent souvent à confusion, ajouté à cela des irrégularités dans la disposition des cellules du tableau, rendant le travail de séparation un vrai défi. La méthodologie proposée tient compte de ces difficultés en opérant une segmentation à plusieurs niveaux de granularité, et en traitant la segmentation comme un problème de classification. D’abord, l’image du document est segmentée en structures linéaires à l’aide d’un lissage horizontal approprié. Le seuil horizontal combiné avec une tolérance verticale avantage le regroupement des éléments fragmentés de la formule sans trop fusionner le texte. Ces structures linéaires sont classées en Texte ou Graphique en s’appuyant sur des descripteurs structurels spécifiques, caractéristiques des deux classes. Ensuite, la segmentation est poursuivie sur les lignes textuelles pour séparer les lignes du tableau de celles de la description. Nous avons proposé pour cette classification un modèle CAC qui permet de déterminer la séquence optimale d’étiquettes associées à la séquence des lignes d’un document. Le choix de ce type de modèle a été motivé par sa capacité à absorber la variabilité des lignes et à exploiter les informations contextuelles. Enfin, pour le problème de la segmentation de tableaux en cellules, nous avons proposé une méthode hybride qui fait coopérer deux niveaux d’analyse : structurel et syntaxique. Le premier s’appuie sur la présence des lignes graphiques et de l’alignement de texte et d’espaces ; et le deuxième tend à exploiter la cohérence de la syntaxe très réglementée du contenu des cellules. Nous avons proposé, dans ce cadre, une approche contextuelle pour localiser les champs numériques dans le tableau, avec reconnaissance des chiffres isolés et connectés. La thèse étant effectuée dans le cadre d’une convention CIFRE, en collaboration avec la société eNovalys, nous avons implémenté et testé les différentes étapes du système sur une base conséquente de documents de chimie / This thesis deals with chemistry document segmentation and structure analysis. This work aims to help chemists by providing the information on the experiments which have already been carried out. The documents are handwritten, heterogeneous and multi-writers. Although their physical structure is relatively simple, since it consists of a succession of three regions representing: the chemical formula of the experiment, a table of the used products and one or more text blocks describing the experimental procedure, several difficulties are encountered. In fact, the lines located at the region boundaries and the imperfections of the table layout make the separation task a real challenge. The proposed methodology takes into account these difficulties by performing segmentation at several levels and treating the region separation as a classification problem. First, the document image is segmented into linear structures using an appropriate horizontal smoothing. The horizontal threshold combined with a vertical overlapping tolerance favor the consolidation of fragmented elements of the formula without too merge the text. These linear structures are classified in text or graphic based on discriminant structural features. Then, the segmentation is continued on text lines to separate the rows of the table from the lines of the raw text locks. We proposed for this classification, a CRF model for determining the optimal labelling of the line sequence. The choice of this kind of model has been motivated by its ability to absorb the variability of lines and to exploit contextual information. For the segmentation of table into cells, we proposed a hybrid method that includes two levels of analysis: structural and syntactic. The first relies on the presence of graphic lines and the alignment of both text and spaces. The second tends to exploit the coherence of the cell content syntax. We proposed, in this context, a Recognition-based approach using contextual knowledge to detect the numeric fields present in the table. The thesis was carried out in the framework of CIFRE, in collaboration with the eNovalys campany.We have implemented and tested all the steps of the proposed system on a consequent dataset of chemistry documents

Nicknames have been analysed, recorded and processed in many diverse ways by different languages, scholars and communities. In Zulu, many works of similar type have all been the size of an article up until 1999. This research on the subject is one of the first done in this depth. Nicknames form part of a Zulu person's daily life. They identify him/her more than the real or legal name. They shape him/her more than any other mode of address. They influence behaviour, personality, interaction based activities and the general welfare of an individual. They discipline, they praise, they mock too. Surprisingly, they are regarded as play items. They are even termed playnames (izidlaliso). But they are as serious as any item that makes an individual to be a significant figure in the community. They are unique in the sense that they stick more obstinately on the victim should he/she try to get rid of them. They are capable of staying for life. They only vanish to give others a chance to feature on the same individual. They are so poetic. A talented onomastician can tell a full story about an individual without him grabbing what is being said about him just because the story is spiced with just a single figurative nickname. They haunt the whole arena of the parts of speech in a language, especially the Zulu language. They modify the well known meaning of words into special references that paint in bright colours the character of an individual. Zulu nicknames processes visit all possible languages and adapt items from into Zuluised special terms that a capable of inheriting an onomastic status. They originate even from the most sensitive sources like people's private lives. The only challenging area about nicknames is that bearers do not want to expose them to peale who are not known to them, even if they do not fall into a category of nicknames for ridicule. Finally, nicknames have been exposed here as linguistic items that organise the community into makers and bearers, and then users of nicknames. / African Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (African Languages)