Description is a form of writing that has long been perceived with some contempt. Due to its undefinable and vague nature, it is indeed uncategorizable, and seems to escape all parameters. What adds to its contempt is its non-utilitarian, non-pragmatical nature; that is, description for the sake of description, or a way to show off knowledgability. Since the Classical period, description had been classified into various categories, just to name a few: chronography, topography, prosopography, prosopopaeia , portrait, parallel, hypotyposis. And still, it had never been attributed a definite theoretical status. Today, the debate continues. In this thesis, I will discuss the linguistic systems of description as defined by Philippe Hamon and Jean-Michel Adam, and to which Jean Molino opposes. / The creative text illustrates that man is in fact indissociable from his environment. Man is greatly determined by the place where he lives. The story is about a woman is forced to return to her original social and cultural background because of her father's death. Her return back to her roots, namely the family business, instigates a requestioning of her cultural identity, and consequently, she develops a pessimistic view of her surroundings.

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Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

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Noun phrases with the definite article the, that we call DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS, following (Russell, 1905), are one of the most common constructs in English, and have been extensively studied by linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and computational linguists. In this dissertation we present an implemented model of definite description processing that is based on extensive empirical studies of definite description use and whose performance can be quantitatively measured. In almost all approaches to discourse processing and discourse representation, definite descriptions have been regarded as anaphoric1; and the models of definite description processing proposed in the literature tend to emphasise the role of common-sense inference mechanisms. Recent work on discourse interpretation (Carletta, 1996; Carletta et al., 1997; Walker and Moore, 1997) has claimed that the judgements on which a theory is based should be shared by more than one subject. On the basis of previous linguistics and corpus linguistics work, we developed several annotation schemes and ran two experiments in which subjects were asked to annotate the uses of definite descriptions in newspaper articles. We compared their annotations and used them to develop our system and to evaluate its performance. Quantitative evaluation has become an issue in other language engineering tasks such as parsing, and has shown its usefulness also for theoretical developments. Recently, evaluation techniques have been introduced for semantic interpretation as well, as is the case for the Sixth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-6) (Sundheim, 1995). However, in this case, the emphasis was on the engineering aspects rather than on a careful study of the phenomena. Our goal has been to develop methods whose performance could be evaluated, but that were based on a careful study of linguistic evidence. The empirical studies we present are evidence that definite descriptions are not primarily anaphoric; they are often used to introduce a new entity in the discourse. Therefore, in the model of definite description processing that we propose, recognising discourse new descriptions plays a role as important as identifying the antecedent of those used anaphorically. Unlike most previous models, our system does not make use of specific hand coded knowledge or common-sense reasoning techniques; the only lexical source we use is WordNet (Miller et al., 1993). As a consequence, our system can process definite descriptions in any domain; a drawback is that our coverage is limited. Nevertheless, our studies serve to reveal the kind of knowledge that is needed for resolving definite descriptions, especially the bridging cases. The system resulting from this work can be useful in applications such as semi-automatic coreference annotation in unrestricted domains.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à la description symbolique d’arborescences vasculaires issues d’images 3D multimodales. Ce travail vise à fournir un cadre méthodologique global pour l’analyse de telles structures et plus particulièrement pour l’arbre vasculaire cérébral. Le domaine d’application clinique visé est la neurochirurgie, notamment pour la planification du geste du praticien. Notre principale contribution est le développement d’une méthode de squelettisation 3D, adaptée aux formes tubulaires et judicieuse pour la description symbolique. Nous proposons de baser la méthode de squelettisation sur la construction de l’arbre de des plus courts chemins de Dijkstra. Ainsi, nous extrayons la branche principale qui correspond à la branche la plus longue de l’arbre de Dijkstra, puis, nous détectons de manière itérative chaque branche annexe en conservant les branches de l’arbre de longueur supérieure à un seuil fixé. Puisque notre squelettisation se réalise de manière itérative, nous possédons les informations locales à chacune des branches. De cette manière, la description symbolique est facilitée et consiste alors en un partitionnement du squelette permettant la collecte de ces informations. Les algorithmes ont été implémentés sous la plateforme logicielle du laboratoire, ArtiMed, et évalués sur données simulées et cliniques. L’évaluation des méthodes de squelettisation et de description symbolique a fait l’objet de l’élaboration d’un plan d’expérience spécifique consistant en une comparaison des résultats sur une série de 18 rotations du volume initial. / This thesis describes the methodology and the evaluation of a symbolic description method applied on vascular trees from multimodal 3D images. This work aims to supply a global methodological framework for the analysis of such structures and, more particularly, for the cerebral vascular tree. The clinical application field is neurosurgery and particularly neurosurgery planning. Our method is based on the application of the minimum cost-spanning tree using Dijkstra’s algorithm and seems well appropriate to tubular objects. We skeletonize the structure in two stages: first, we extract the main branch which corresponds to the longest branch of the Dijkstra’s tree, then, we detect iteratively every secondary branch by keeping the branches of the tree which length is superior to a fixed threshold. Since our skeletonization works in an iterative way, we possess local information for each branch. In this way, the symbolic description is facilitated and consists in a partitioning of the skeleton to collect the descriptive characteristics. Algorithms were implemented on the laboratory software platform (ArtiMED) developed in Borland C++ and estimated on digital and clinical data. The evaluation scheme adopts a specific experiment approach consisting in a comparison of the results of a series of 18 rotations of the initial volume.

This thesis presents detailed descriptions of the English adverbial of degree (e.g., very, quite,rather,extremely) and the adverbial of extent (e.g., much, some, at all, excessively).

L'arrivée des supercalculateurs post-petascales and exascales offre la perspective d'accélérer la résolution des problèmes d'ingénierie et aux modélisations hautement complexes. Cependant, ces futurs systèmes posent des problèmes aux informaticiens pour construire de telles machines. De nombreux problèmes doivent être résolus comme la tolérance aux pannes, la consommation énergétique et la programmation de ces systèmes complexes composés de milliard de coeurs.Dans cette thèse, nous nous sommes concentrés sur l'aspect programmation et proposons un paradigme de programmation multi-niveaux composé de trois niveaux. Pour le bas niveau, un paradigme data parallèle est proposé pour programmer les processeurs à nombreux coeurs pour sa focalisation sur la distribution et le mouvement des données. Nous avons implémenté et évalué le produit matrice vecteur creux suivant différents formats de matrice creuse sur un GPU pour illustrer ce point. Pour le niveau intermédiaire, nous proposons un paradigme à passage de messages de manière à optimiser les communications inter-processeurs et inter-noeuds. Pour le haut niveau, un paradigme de description de graphe est proposé pour programmer et gérer le parallélisme entre les noeuds.Avec une méthode d'inversion matricielle dense développée en YML, nous soulignons l'intérêt des graphes pour la réduction du temps à la solution et pour le support des communications asynchrones de facon transparente. L'intérêt des graphes est également démontré pour les optimisations d'entrées/sorties et leur support dans un modèle de programmation. Nous concluons finalement en analysant une telle proposition de paradigme de programmation pour les machines exascale et présentons la direction des travaux futurs. / The coming of post-petscale and exascale supercomputers offers the perspective to accelerate the solving of engineering problems and to highly complex modeling. However, these future systems challenge computer scientists to built such machines. Many issues must be faced such as fault-tolerance, energy consumption and the programming of these complex systems composed of billion cores.In this thesis, we have focused on the programming aspect and propose a multi-level programming paradigm composed of three levels. For the low level, a data parallel paradigm is proposed to program many-cores processors for its focus on data mapping and movements. We have implemented and evaluated the SpMV with various sparse matrix formats on GPU to illustrate this point. For the intermediate level, we propose a message passing paradigm in order to optimize inter-sockets and inter-nodes communications. For the high level, a graph description paradigm is proposed to program and manage the parallelism between nodes.With a dense matrix inversion method developed in YML, we underline the interest of graph for the Time-To-Solution reduction and for the support of asynchronous communications in a transparent way. The interest of graph is also demonstrated for I/O optimizations and for their direct support into the programming model. We finally conclude by analyzing a such proposition of programming paradigm for exascale machines and outlines the future work direction.