ORIGINS OF HYPERTEXT

A technique widely used today

Hypertext encompasses a particular aspect of the virtual book that is playing an increasingly important part with the expansion of the Internet and the web. The success of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) -attests to its dynamism. Nowadays it seems so natural and so usual that we manipulate it with ease and we discover its ancestors among medieval cabalists or among other commentators of sacred texts. Every indexation, every note and every comment suggest a potential rudimentary hypertext. However, before its expansion over the entire planet, with the network of worldwide telecommunication, before being programmed on to every PC, hypertext took form in the minds of a few learned visionaries. We will refer to two of them.

Memex

The first is Vannevar Bush, whose photograph shows him as a likeable and shrewd man in his sixties, a wonderful grandfather such as we would all like to have had! He was an outstanding physicist, notable for the quality of his work, and who, during the Second World War, was head of the United States Office for Scientific Research and Development. As director of that body, he co-ordinated the work of more than six thousand researchers who in their turn directed the war effort of American and allied scientists.

Towards the end of the war, Vannevar Bush wondered how to convert the scientists' efforts to peaceful purposes. Physicists had achieved mastery of the material world. Much knowledge had been built up during the preceding years, but at the same time people were specialising more and more with, in consequence, a much narrower outlook. What was needed then was to take advantage of all existing technical knowledge to conquer the world of the mind. In July 1945, Bush published an article entitled "As We May Think", in which he explained how the new process of dry photography would soon be recording scientific thought, so making it easier to access. According to him, new ways of thinking would result from the use of these mechanisms, which would constitute MEmory EXtensions, or, abbreviated, MEMEX.

According to Vannevar Bush, microfilm techniques would soon allow for very high density storage of information to the point where the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica would be held in a space smaller than a box of matches and that a library of a million books would be compressed to take up only one corner of a desk. Once stored, this information would become accessible by means of a few key words just as millions of telephone subscribers are by a few numbers. Moreover, we could visualize the data stored on microfilm by simply projecting them on to frosted glass. At the heart of this external memory, MEMEX as Bush called it, is a mechanism for selecting documents by association, much as our own memory would do, and not alphabetically like a rudimentary automaton. As documents are consulted they can be added to at leisure with reading notes and personal comments which remain attached to texts or passages of text, but which can also be accessed directly, and independently of the text, like filing cards. In addition, the reader can set up links between documents, which will be stored on paths -Vannevar Bush used the word 'trail', -and which will subsequently set up new connections between the various texts.

Once selected, most of the documents contained in this external memory system will appear on a screen unless they are to be reproduced in the form of sound, either words or music. All modes of communication are envisaged and, in concluding his article, Bush envisages even direct electrical connections with the brain by means of electrodes. Transformed into prototype Cyborgs, we would connect ourselves up directly to MEMEX without the need to read, watch or listen.

What is there to be added to this rapidly sketched picture of the grandfather of multimedia, Vannevar Bush? Nothing, except a small detail unconnected with our discussion. As co-ordinator of the Office of Research and Development during the Second World War, Vannevar Bush was responsible for the manufacture of the atomic bomb. Therefore, to paraphrase the logicians, who assert so frequently that "the morning and evening stars are the same", we could point out, without any deeper intention, that "the grandfather of the Internet was also the father of the atomic bomb". I apologise to the reader for this digression that has nothing to do with the subject of this article.

Xanadu

The second visionary, Theodor Holm Nelson, began his career by studying philosophy. He describes how he suffered a great deal in writing his first essay entitled "Truth, Man and Choice" as he found it difficult to organise his ideas into a sequential order. After his initial contact with computers in 1960, he imagined a tool to help with conceptualisation. According to him, the whole problem was that a complicated idea did not lend itself easily to being reduced to linear form, suitable to being explained sequentially. It often appears to us as a tangled ball of wool that can be seen differently, depending on your point of view. What was needed then was a tool, which would record the links between the different facets of an idea, without obliging us to express them in a strictly linear manner. Nelson invented the neologism "structangle" to refer to the confused structure that the computer would be able to help us to clarify and use. In 1960, he promised himself that he would write his next book with the help of this tool. He thought that by 1962 it would all be ready. Twenty years later the programme had not been completed yet. In the following years this idea spawned the Xanadu project, which, to my knowledge, despite many assertions as to its completeness, is still unfinished.

However, since 1960, in the spirit of Theodor Nelson, the computer has opened up three new possibilities:

1. Texts can be interconnected so that references to a specific author or a specific text can send the reader directly to the document cited, without any effort on his part. 2. Organisation, visualisation and comparison of ideas are now possible: the Xanadu project just mentioned is the result of this. It remains to describe and make the "structangles" referred to above. 3. The use of prefabricated constructions is also possible: as I understand it, Nelson is hoping to construct libraries of predefined structures which would help us to forge new ideas, by starting with fragments of old ideas, in order to compare ideas and to check on the originality of a supposedly new idea. Of these three possibilities, only the first one has really seen the light of day.

So, whilst Nelson's aspirations encompassed the organisation of ideas between themselves, only the interconnection of texts, otherwise called hypertext, has led to effective realisations

In 1965, five years after his first "illuminations", Nelson published in the proceedings of the twentieth national conference of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) an article entitled "A file Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate". In this, he described an original data structure intended to represent incomplete knowledge and to retrieve easily the corresponding information. On the technical level this data structure is built up with interconnected lists using symmetrical pointers. An appropriate language of manipulation preserves the structure of the texts across the interconnections, so that, for example, the order of notes reflects the order of the reference to the notes, even after a change on the source text. The links between the texts would thus indicate either a reference to a particular text or that one text had been copied in another.

Without going into detail we should note that Nelson was taking up the formalisms used by the pioneers of artificial intelligence, (Newell, Simon, Bachman, Bobrow and Weizenbaum amongst others) in order to create an external memory similar to the MEMEX conceived by Vannevar Bush. In addition to this computer specification, Theodor Nelson created another neologism in his 1965 article. He decided to call the interconnected text hypertext, because just as hyperspace extends and generalises space by adding a dimension to it, these interconnections extend text beyond the initial linearity of strings of characters.

Finally, also in the same article, Theodor Nelson anticipated that, taking account of the drop in the price of computers ($37,000 in 1965), they would soon cost much less than a secretary. He thought that publishers, journalists or researchers should soon be taking advantage of them, which would justify using them as an aid to reading and writing.

The heirs

Many others followed the same path and gave substance to that which had been envisaged. I mention in particular Douglas Engelbart, who, at Stanford Research Institute in 1964 invented the mouse, as a controlled intermediary, facilitating the passage between our mental universe and the computer state. Douglas Engelbart also made a significant contribution to the development of hypertexts, seen as physical additions to ourselves with a view to increasing our intellectual capacities. It is worth noting in this context that with hypertext it is the boundary between our interior and exterior selves that tends to shift.

However, it was not until the eighties that hypertext became generally accessible on personal computers.

Then, during the nineties, hypertext itself was considerably extended by Tim Berners-Lee. He suggested moving beyond the individual computer to set up associative links with other computers through telecommunications networks, thus creating the principles of the "World Wide Web".

Independently of these technical developments, much thought was given to understanding hypertext and what distinguished it from traditional text. 1 In the first place, hypertext breaks away to some extent from the linearity that we are accustomed to in traditional text. Of course, some dictionaries and encyclopaedias allow for non-linear access. Moreover, the network of indices and references present in biblical texts suggests other ways of reading. Finally, concise structures, such as aphorisms and poetry anthologies, do not require sustained reading. Nevertheless, until now, essays, novels, educational works were essentially intended for sequential and comprehensive reading. With hypertext, there is no longer any question about it; new narrative forms, such as branching novels, are envisaged.

Secondly, with the computer screen, the visual space can be configured as desired, according to requirements. The fixed space of the printed page is no longer a constraint. Various windows coexist, move relatively to one another, change shape and go with or against the stream of the text using a descending or ascending lift.

Thirdly, the links allow for a comparison between very different types of text. Starting with a single word, we call for an etymological dictionary, we consult for this same word occurring elsewhere in the text may or read a learned treaty.

These developments bring with them many consequences for both reading and writing.

Amongst these, the most important is that, as the author writes a new chapter, he does not know the reader's cognitive state because he does not know the exact order in which the chapters have been read. In short, there are numerous routes open to the reader who plays an increasingly active role, whereas the author is in part relinquishing power over the reader. He is no longer taking the reader by the hand, he is no longer the master, he just explains from time to time, depending on whether he is asked.

All these changes to the status of the reader, the author and the text inevitably bring to mind the theoretical writings of the so-called French neo-structuralists. And it is said in the United States, amongst those involved in hypertext studies, that hypertexts put into practice the theories of these philosophers, to the extent that makes reading them pointless. Regarding this, an American writer, Gregory L. Ulmer 2 took a rhetorical construct, the play within a play, commented on at length by Jacques Derrida, and proceeded to deconstruct it, in the new and unpublished form of an electronic rhetoric. With the help of a hypermedia, containing various fragments of criticism and comments, and two processes described as editing and directing, an algorithm created texts by combining the initial fragments. The resulting machine generated analyses quite widely distributed in the hypertext community, expressed with the help of hypermedia, containing writings -or comments -from French neostructuralists, technical texts and newspaper articles. This theoretical 2 Gregory ULMER, "Grammatology (in the Stacks) of Hypermedia, a Simulation: Or, when does a pile become a heap?" in Literacy Online, The Promise (and Peril) trick makes a mockery of commonly held views. It can only spur us on to continue the analysis in order to try to measure more accurately the appropriateness of the writings of the French neo-structuralists to the theory of hypertexts.

REFERENCE TO FRENCH "NEO-STRUCTURALISM"

In order to do this we will go through the main commonly cited arguments that bring together the hypertext theoreticians and the French neo-structuralists. We will also look at original texts and the practical significance of the commonly cited arguments in the current context of the generalised use of hypertext.

Beyond the printed page

Let us begin with the most concrete aspect of texts, the printing on the page. In several of his works, Jacques Derrida freed himself from the constraints of traditional printing. To illustrate this here is the first page of Glas3 , a work published in 1974 that places in parallel comments from Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit" and some of Jean Genet's literary writings.

We are not considering here the text of this beautiful work, which blends speculative philosophy and literature. That alone would merit an extended and learned discussion. We will only examine its physical layout. First of all the square shape of the book breaks with convention. In addition, the size is clearly unusual. Then, the first page of the text begins with a letter in lower case, to suggest of course that this is a continuation of a text that has started elsewhere.

The page layout conveys the division between philosophy and literature: two columns are cut by comments, notes, glosses and definitions placed as inserts.

Two different books to be read separately, but put in parallel each one distracts from the reading of the other. Added to these intertwined writings, is a mixture of different type sizes and fonts that ignore the rules of typography.

In fact, what we can see here a desire to free the visual space from the rules governing the printed page and to set out before the reader information of various kinds. What at first glance appears to resemble a hypermedia screen turns out to be very different. When looked at closely the aims seem to be altogether dissimilar. Hypertext offers the reader comments that appear on request to enhance reading or reply to questions. The fluidity of digitised text and the interconnections by means of symbolic links facilitate active communication from one text to another. Given this, the reader can follow the thread of his own curiosity, at his own pace. In Glas, Jacques Derrida infringes typographic rules and the conventions of page layout in order to decelerate reading, to slow down our movement over the space of the page and to force meditation, re-reading and contemplation of the texts. Is that his intention? Most certainly it is. A short passage from Dissemination testifies to his desire for the direction to be hidden.

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harboured in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

Thus, perpetually and essentially, they risk being definitely lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances?

In any case, the dissimulation of the woven texture can take centuries to unravel its web. It is a web that envelops a web, unravelling its web for centuries. 4 In short, Derrida's stance opposes that of the originators of the hypermedia. On the one side, in Derrida's work we see a spatial layout designed according to what might be called "principle of dissimulation", whereas on the other side the hypertext theorists support an opposing principle, the "principle of transparency".

Multiplicity of readings

After examining physical layout, we now concentrate on the text itself and on reading. In his famous essay, S/Z, Roland Barthes divides the text of a Balzac short story, entitled Sarrasine, into 556 fragments called lexias. He explains his method clearly:

We shall therefore star the text, separating in the manner of a minor earthquake, the blocks of signification of which reading only grasps the smooth surface, imperceptibly soldered by the movement of sentences, the flowing discourse of narration, the naturalness of ordinary language. The tutor signifier will be cut up into a series of brief, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading. Admittedly, this cutting up will be arbitrary in the extreme; it will imply no methodological responsibility, since it will bear on the signifier, whereas the proposed analysis bears solely on the signified. 5 Like so many stars floating away in a black sky, these lexias reassemble into constellations and give birth to different readings called codes. Roland Barthes' essay proposes five, but he hints at the existence of others still to be discovered.

Without going into the detail of Roland Barthes' very subtle analysis, we can observe a very clear structural analogy with hypertexts that take the reader on a number of journeys between fragments of text.

We should add here that Roland Barthes had a filing cabinet of readings in which he assembled notes and links in a way similar to that occurring in hypertext. As many people would encourage us to do, we could therefore find in Roland Barthes a pioneer and theoretician of "hypertextuality". However, a careful examination leaves a doubt.

Contrary to the precursors of hypertexts, who aspire to supply information, Roland Barthes considers the text to be already read. Besides, he only included it as an appendix to S/Z, and nothing encourages its reading. Far from proposing even a fragmentary reading of Balzac's text, Barthes leads us to multiple and unrelated readings of the text or more precisely of the letter of the text, otherwise expressed as "over readings", emphasising both their number and their irreverent character.

What we seek is to sketch the stereographic space of writing (which will here be a classic, readable writing). The commentary, based on the affirmation of the plural, cannot therefore work with "respect" to the text; the tutor text will ceaselessly be broken, interrupted without any regard for its natural divisions (syntactical, rhetorical, anecdotal); inventory, explanation, and digression may deter any observation of suspense, may even separate verb and complement, noun and attribute; the work of the commentary, once it is separated from any ideology of totality, consists precisely in manhandling the text, interrupting it. What is thereby denied is not the quality of the text (here incomparable) but its "naturalness." 6To sum up, on one side the hypertext encourages "under-reading" by giving easy access to units of information. These necessary markers separate the important aspects of the matter that would otherwise be drowned in an immense and monotonous ocean of text. On the other side, Roland Barthes' device encourages "over-reading", or in other words, further, deeper perusal of an ancient text, already well known but where further working would bear fruit, by bringing out new meaning.

Here, then we can see that the neo-structuralist system in no way legitimises theories of "hypertextuality", and in fact is just the opposite. "Over-reading", adding sense, bringing fresh material to ancient concepts, is contrary to "browsing" and picking up bits and pieces here and there in a text, unreadable through its sheer immensity.

Death of the Author?

"Over-reading", or more precisely the patient reconstruction which draws the reader into discovering the underlying structure of an old text, leads us to consider another oft-cited argument, not about the text but about the author, or rather his disappearance and the relationship between the author and reader.

In Vannevar Bush's writings, technical articles appear completely accessible and transparent. Hypertext gives easy access to them. The author retains a place as writer and text producer, but he effaces his individuality and provides only the content. From then on, the texts, the books and the author's body of work disappear to be replaced by a universal library to which all contribute. With his aptitude for flowery neologisms, Theodor Nelson gives the name "docuverse" to the universal, impersonal virtual library resulting from the interconnection of all the documents.

Among the French neo-structuralists, the loss of the author takes on quite a different significance. The author is not totally rejected into the impersonal obscurity of a contents manufacturer. In an address to the French Philosophical Society (Société Française de Philosophie) entitled "What is an Author?" 7 Michel Foucault examines the conditions that define the existence of the author. Is it the total of his written output? If so, where does the body of his work stop? Do laundry lists or grocery orders of a great writer belong to his oeuvre? It is a current issue at a time when present techniques permit continual recording of our words and deeds at every moment of our lives.

Great literary figures of the past, authors of canonical religious texts or great scientists are unquestionably defined by their texts, books or their body of work, even if their own contribution, through these texts, books and bodies of work, does not belong wholly to them or relate only to one individual being, to a lone self.

However, Michel Foucault considers that since the 19th century, a new type of writer has appeared, not to be confused with the great authors of the past. They themselves are not reflected in their writings, or in their books or in their body of work, but in the break they have put in place in the minds. Freud and Marx are not only established authors of texts, but are authoritative references, or as Michel Foucault expresses it, they are "instigators of 'discursivity'". After them works of literature are no longer read in the same way. In fact Foucault does not presage the death of the author, but his being strengthened, which is quite the reverse.

Here again the misunderstanding is clearly revealed. On the one hand, for the hypertext theoreticians the "self" of the author is obliterated in the impersonal and universal "docuverse". On the other hand, for Foucault and the other neo-structuralists, the death of the author, the distinction between writing, the text and its producer, all this establishes the figure of the "instigator of 'discursivity'". This is an author of a different kind, a "super-author", the master who guides ordinary writers and who himself defines the rules of the game. Moreover, everything bears out that this is a game, a gap, a vacant space to which, according to Jacques Derrida, all textual powers must be accorded:

If reading and writing are one, as is easily thought these days, if reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated (con)fusion nor identity at perfect rest; the is that couples reading with writing must rip apart.

One must then, in a single gesture, but doubled, read and write. And that person would have understood nothing of the game who, at this [du coup], would feel himself authorized merely to add on; that is, to add any old thing. He would add nothing: the seam wouldn't hold. Reciprocally, he who through "methodological prudence," "norms of objectivity," or "safeguards of knowledge" would refrain from committing anything of himself, would not read at all. The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the "not serious" as in the "serious." The reading or writing supplement must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a game, by the logic of play, signs to which the system of all textual powers must be accorded and attuned.8

SHARED NIETZSCHEISM

With the French neo-structuralists comes the breath of freedom. They invite us to re-read ancient works differently, freeing us from the weight of suffocating tradition. The perspective opened up by the hypertext theoreticians is proving to be quite different as it aims to extend man's cognitive limits. That being the case, how could such close ties have been woven between thinkers with such different concerns? I would like to present you with a hypothesis, which would necessitate lengthy justification. However, it would require more space than is here available to argue the case and more competence than I possess to do so.

I am presenting it, nevertheless, as it seems to me appropriate to open a polemic discussion. According to this working hypothesis, the proximity between the theoreticians of "hypertextuality" and the neostructuralists is not due to a synchronicity of concerns, but to what might be termed shared Nietzscheism, or more precisely, to having the same degree of sensitiveness to the themes presented in Nietzsche's work.

Of course, in contrast to the neo-structuralists, for the hypertext theoreticians, this is partly, even completely, automatic as they do not refer explicitly to works of philosophy.

To substantiate this theory, I will simply take two very evident themes from Nietzsche's work, those of vitalism and superman, but obviously the theory could be applied to others.

Vitalism

Firstly, let us recall some elements of Nietzsche's theory of vitalism by quoting from "Untimely Meditations".

Is life to dominate knowledge and science, or is knowledge to dominate life? Which of these two forces is the higher and more decisive? There can be no doubt: life is the higher, the dominating force, for knowledge which annihilated life would have annihilated itself with it. Knowledge presupposes life and thus has in the preservation of life the same interest as any creature has in its own continued existence.9

By careful scrutiny of the texts, we discover a vitalism among the neo-structuralists very similar to that of the theoreticians of "hypertextuality". Here are some examples.

Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy", in the title itself, then in its contents and especially in the re-reading of the dialogue in Phaedrus, indicates evidence of such a concern. Let us remember that Derrida interprets the whole of Phaedrus which, as is well known, teaches the process of writing, as being a betrayal of speech and thence of truth, starting with the notion of the pharmakon, touched on in passing by Socrates at the start of the dialogue. Pharmakon refers to the poison and the remedy, a vehicle of death and a curative source. The Phaedrus, which seemed only to be a process of writing, now becomes the process of reproduction authorised by the writing, of identical repetition, and of replication seen as a kind of death. Just as the Pharmakon concerns both the remedy and the poison, so writing treats and revives thought while fixing it in a sterile form.

Similarly, in S/Z Roland Barthes deliberately chose "Sarrasine", a short story in which, from the first words, life confronts death: Thus, on my right, the dark and silent image of death; on my left, the seemly bacchanalias of life: here cold nature, dull, in mourning; there, human beings enjoying themselves. On the borderline between these two so different scenes, which, a thousand times repeated in various guises, make Paris the world's most amusing and most philosophical city, I was making for myself a moral macédoine, half pleasant, half funereal. With my left foot I beat time, and I felt as though the other were in the grave. My leg was in fact chilled by one of those insidious drafts which freeze half our bodies while the other half feels the humid heat of rooms, an occurrence rather frequent at balls. 10 In each case, by dint of "over-reading" the dead text an attempt is made to breathe life into it.

Vitalism is expressed by the hypertext theorists too, but in a slightly different fashion. It is clearly to be found in the work of Bush, in his desire to graft on to modern man an external memory, MEMEX. Theodor Nelson expresses it even more perfectly when he proposes the hypothesis called "Gaia", taken from literature, which claims that the whole of human cultural heritage is said to behave like a living being maintaining its energy balance by bringing to its surface the elements required to cool and balance its calorific exchanges. Thus, according to Nelson, we find ourselves in a configuration similar to the Lovelock thesis according to which an algal bloom emerges on the surface of the ocean in order for energy to be lost and the ocean's temperature regulated.

Let us note in any case that of the two forms of vitalism discussed here, one aims to promote the inner nature of the singular reader by supplementing his intellectual life through the "reading-writing" approach to apparently dead texts. The second sets out to expand the life of each individual in an exterior world, this world being both physical, as shown precisely by Vannevar Bush's MEMEX, and spiritual, as expressed by Ted Nelson in his strange thermodynamic of cultural inflorescences. In conclusion, whilst vitalism for some is set on a conquest of the interior life, for others it aims to extend the power of life and the power of man over the outside world.

The coming of the "superman"

Another of Nietzsche's themes is that of the superman. We have seen how the neo-structuralists, in particular Michel Foucault, having declared the death of the author, substitute the instigator of discursivity, hailed, if not as a superman at least as a super-author, upsetting traditional interpretations so that classical works are reread in a new light; or, to go back to the words of Nietzsche himself, to organise interior chaos by reflecting on our real needs.

Similarly, Vannevar Bush, in seeking to extend the memory of the individual beyond its physiological limits, envisages a superior being, or superman. Equally, with the Xanadu project, Nelson is trying to stretch the capabilities of conceptualisation beyond their normal limits.

However, we see that here too misunderstanding persists. In their fidelity to Nietzsche's reasoning, the neo-structuralists wish to give back life and autonomy to the spiritual process submerged in the individual conscience by the overwhelming torrent of memory. They have to free themselves from the heavy weight of traditional authority and propose new ways of reading.

On the other hand, in the case of Vannevar Bush it is always a question of conquering the exterior world. Since the Second World War, this conquest has become a peaceful matter, it is no longer through the destruction of men but by their extensions beyond themselves, through the arrival of men newly grafted onto the exterior world and through new technical devices. There is no doubt that in consequence man will be different. If a man is seen as coupled to his prostheses, then he will be more powerful. We could then talk about "superman". However, having once been assisted, if he is then seen isolated and stripped of his instruments, he will once more become infirm and incapable of carrying out his normal tasks. We are certainly witnessing the coming of a new species, but an inferior species, a sort of "under-man".

We have been exploring the theories of "hypertextuality", current in the United States today. We have tried to understand several of the claims being made, in order to compare them with texts cited as examples in an attempt to assess their legitimacy. I believe that we have shown that there is a discrepancy between the two. In any case, we have not made any progress. We have not yet mastered the way of using these new techniques; we still understand poorly the cognitive processes of reading and writing and the changes brought about by the generalised concept of hypertext. Supporting arguments are mostly constructed from contemporary theories on "hypertextuality", not accounting for the real changes in ways of acquisition and conceptualisation. We should therefore form new theories, not based on pure speculation, but on a wealth of historical, psychological, and linguistic material. It is the only way to move our thinking forward on what is certainly one of the major issues of our age.

Jean-Gabriel GANASCIA (CNRS-Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris)

  of Reading and Writing with Computers, texts assembled by Myron C. TUMAN, University of Pittsburgh press 1992, p. 139-158.

See Jay D. BOLTER, Writing Space. The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing, Hillsdale New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers 1991 and BOLTER, Jay David, "Literature in the Electronic Writing Space", in Literacy Online, The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, texts assembled by Myron C. TUMAN, University of Pittsburgh Press 1992, p. 19-42.

Jacques DERRIDA, Glas, Paris, Editions Galilée, collection Digraphe 1974

Jacques DERRIDA, Dissemination, (trans. Barbara JOHNSON), Chicago University Press 1981, p.63

Roland BARTHES, S/Z: An Essay (trans. Richard MILLER),Hill and Wang, N.Y. 1974, p.13

Ibid. p. 15

Michel FOUCAULT, "What is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, (trans. BOUCHARD & SIMON), Cornell U.P.1977

Jacques DERRIDA Dissemination, trans. Barbara JOHNSON Chicago University Press 1981, p.63

Friedrich NIETZSCHE, Untimely Meditations II On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Breazeale, Hollingdale, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, p. 121

Roland BARTHES, S/Z: An Essay (trans. Richard MILLER),Hill and Wang, N.Y. 1974, p.222


The introduction of a maintenance expert system into an industrial context: the case of the P.A.M container terminal of Fos-Commerce René Baleydier, Nathalie Fabbe-Costes, Didier Collas To cite this version: René Baleydier, Nathalie Fabbe-Costes, Didier Collas. The introduction of a maintenance expert system into an industrial context: the case of the P.A.M container terminal of Fos-Commerce. ORIA "Artificial Intelligence and Sea" 87, IRIAM (Institut International de Robotique et d'Intelligence Artificielle de Marseille), Jun 1987, Marseille, France. hal-01287234


Guillaume Jacques

Derivational verbal morphology in Khaling 卡岭语动词的派生形态 *

Keywords: Khaling, Kiranti, Applicative, Anticausative, Causative, Incorporation, Analogy 提要:本文描写卡岭语动词的几种派生形态,包括应用态/使动态的-t 后缀以及表示反使动态的声母清浊交替,

This works describes the -t applicative/causative, the voicing alternation as well as a few other residual morphological processes in Khaling, and discusses their relevance to Sino-Tibetan historical comparison.

Introduction

In the Sino-Tibetan family, the Kiranti languages are among those with the most complex verbal morphology. This morphology is both typologically unusual [START_REF] Bickel | Free prefix ordering in Chintang[END_REF]) and potentially ancient (Jacques 2012a, De-Lancey 2014). A detailed description of the verbal morphology of Kiranti languages is therefore of potential interest to both typologists and comparative linguists.

Of all the Kiranti languages, Khaling presents perhaps the most complex set of stem alternations. [START_REF] Jacques | An overview of Khaling verbal morphology[END_REF] provide a description of these alternations and a model explaining how to build an abstract root from which all alternations can be predicted. 1

In addition to this complex inflexional morphology, Khaling also presents a rich system of derivation, which has a number of clear parallels in the Kiranti subfamily. In this paper, three derivations are described and analyzed: applicative/causative, incorporation and anticausative. Other valency alternations such as the reciprocal and causative, which involve periphrastic constructions, as well as the reflexive, which presents a special conjugation, are not discussed here and will be presented in a forthcoming work.

The present research is based on a database comprised of 648 verb roots. Unless necessary, only root forms are quoted; the reader can refer to [START_REF] Jacques | An overview of Khaling verbal morphology[END_REF] to determine the conjugated forms from these roots.

Applicative

Of all the Sino-Tibetan languages, the -t applicative suffix is best preserved in the Kiranti languages [START_REF] Michailovsky | Tibeto-burman dental suffixes: Evidence from Limbu (Nepal)[END_REF]. This suffix is also found in various branches of the family, though only faint traces remain (see Jacques 2004: 410 for Rgyalrong, [START_REF] Sagart | The Chinese Names of the Four Directions[END_REF] for Chinese; it is unclear whether Tibetan preserves any examples of this suffix).

The applicative -t does not appear to be fully productive in Khaling, but it is attested in many examples, which can be classified into three groups.

Recipient/experiencer applicative

In these examples, the derivation converts an intransitive verb into a transitive one. The A of the transitive verbs corresponds to the S of the intransitive one, and the O of the transitive verb is either an experiencer/addressee ("to laugh at", "to call") or a stimulus ("to be afraid of," "to be dissatisfied with").

The example "to coax" is problematic; however, if this comparison is correct, this verb underwent a considerable semantic change.

Benefactive applicative

.

There is only one good example of a benefactive applicative, |kur| "to carry (vt)" > |kurt| "to carry for so (vt)." Another possible example is |rep| "to stand (vi)" > |rept| "to respect, to make offerings (vt)," though if this is correct this comparison involves extensive semantic changes.

Causative

.

Although Khaling has a productive causative construction involving the auxiliary |mutt|, the -t suffix is also used to form causatives. Although most cases of causative/applicative isomorphism are due to grammaticalization from a common source, without necessarily implying a change of causative > applicative or the reverse (Peterson 2007: 64). In this particular case the source of -t is not recoverable anymore; both the applicative and causative meanings are also found in related languages for cognates of this suffix.

31 examples of causative -t have been found; table 2 present some selected representative examples. Intransitive verbs with open syllables receive two distinct treatments. Some have a causative form with the simple -t suffix (the motion verbs |pi| "come (level)" > |pit| "bring (level)"1 and |ɦo| "come" > |ɦot| "bring"). Others have a double -tt suffix: |tshɛ| "spread (vi)" > |tshɛtt| "expand (vt)", |ghrɛ| "to light up, to burn" > |ghrɛtt| "to put on (the light)".

An significant proportion (10 out of 31) of causative verbs with the -t suffix have a root ending in -n. This bias is by no means fortuitous, and requires a detailed explanation.

As shown in [START_REF] Jacques | An overview of Khaling verbal morphology[END_REF], the conjugations of CVC roots and of CVCt roots in Khaling are almost entirely identical: 1d←→3, 1p←→3, 2d←→3 as well as all inverse forms, are identical between the two conjugation classes. Only 1sg→3, 2sg→3, and 3→3 forms are distinct, as shown in table 3 using a minimal pair of transitive verbs with the CVC conjugation in |-op| and the CVCt conjugation in |-opt|.

Table 3: Now, aside from overt marking, a common means of changing valency in Khaling is simply lability: many roots can be conjugated either transitively or intransitively. For instance, |bhrok| "break" can be conjugated both ways.

Thus, it is likely that some of the apparent "causative" verbs belonging to the CVnt conjugation class (such as |thint| "wake up" presented in table 4) originated from transitive CVn roots, before the two classes were merged, which would explain the over-representation of this conjugation class among causative -t verbs. In many of these verbs, the apparent -t suffix is only a mirage, and does not reflect a genuine derivation, it is instead a byproduct of lability and analogical pressure on paradigms.

Vestigial -t

In some case,s only the applicative/causative form survives, while the base intransitive form has disappeared. A good example is provided by |ʔipt| "put to sleep (vt)." No root *|ʔip| exists in Khaling (though cognates of this verb can be found even outside of Kiranti, as exemplified by the Japhug possessed noun -ʑɯβ "sleep" < *jip; see [START_REF] Matisoff | Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman[END_REF] for further examples). The simplex verb has been replaced by the reflexive form of |ʔipt|, |ʔipt-si| "to sleep (vi)," whose infinitive is /ʔʌmsinɛ/. Interestingly, this replacement appears to be very old, as all Kiranti languages appear to form their verb "to sleep" with a reflexive form.

In Limbu, its cognate |ips| "to sleep" [START_REF] Michailovsky | Limbu-English Dictionary[END_REF] is not transparently a reflexive verb, but its |-s| element is likely derived from the |-si| reflexive suffix. 2This lexical replacement (by a derived form of the same root) appears to be a common Kiranti innovation, and thus must be taken into account in studying language classification. It should also be noted that a vestigial -t appears in many deponent verbs (syntactically intransitive verbs but morphologically transitive, such as |ʔopt| "rise (of the sun)," |ʔomt| "ripen," |bhukt| "explode" etc; see [START_REF] Michailovsky | Catégories verbales et intransitivité duale en limbu[END_REF] for similar examples in Limbu).

Other suffixes

We find an isolated example |phɛt| "exchange, swap (vt)" > |phɛnt| "change (a new one) (vt)" which appears to involve nasalization of the final stop (as mentioned above, the -nt transitive root is probably an ancient transitive -n root). Without external comparisons, however, this example is unlikely to be explicable.

Incorporation and denominal verb

Unlike Rgyalrong languages (Jacques 2012c), denominal derivations are not widespread in Khaling. The only clear example of a verb deriving from a noun (by zero-derivation) is the intransitive |ti| "to lay eggs" from ti "egg."

There are only two potential examples of incorporation:

1. |lɛm-thi| "to walk (vi)" (with the second person prefix inserted between the incorporated noun and the verb root). lɛm is the noun meaning "path, trail," and |thi| does not appear to exist on its own (there is a verb |thi| meaning "to tumble," but it is probably unrelated). The second person prefix appears after the incorporated noun (lɛm-ʔi-thi 'you walk').

2. |tsɛ-ʔi| "to be bad (vi)" and |tsɛ-nu| "to be nice (vi)." |ʔi| exists as a verb "to be angry (vi)" and |nu| "to be nice." The etymology of the |tsɛ| element is unclear. The second person prefix appears before |ts-| in the reflexive form (ʔi-tsɛʔi ̂-nsi 2/inv-be.unpleasant-refl 'you are embarassed')

Anticausative

Khaling, like all Kiranti languages and most Sino-Tibetan languages, have verb pairs exhibiting voicing alternation, whereby the voiced form is intransitive, and the unvoiced one transitive, for instance |dzhɛm| "to be lost" and |tsɛm| "to lose." Although some scholars are prone to interpreting such alternations as originating from an "*s-causative prefix" (which devoiced the initial consonant of the transitive form), this is not the only, or the most probable explanation for these alternations.

In Rgyalrong languages, the causative prefix sɯ-/zis not a reconstruction, and is still fully productive (it can even be applied to Chinese loanwords). These languages, however, also present voicing alternations, which are more specifically an anticausative derivation. The anticausative prenasalization derives an intransitive verb out of a transitive one, which, unlike the passive (which also exist in Japhug, see Jacques 2012b), expresses an action occurring spontaneously and without an external agent. The prenasalization even applies to one Tibetan loanword χtɤr "to scatter (vt)" (from gtor) > ʁndɤr "to get scattered (vi)."

The Rgyalrong parallel thus makes it more likely to analyze the voicing alternations in Khaling as the remnants of anticausative prenasalization, though, as we will see, this explanation may not hold true for all forms.

In Khaling, we find seven verb pairs with an alternation between unvoiced (aspirated or non aspirated) stops/affricates and voiced aspirate ones (Table 5; the last example is doubtful). Some of these pairs have cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages. |kukt| / |ghuk| is cognate to Japhug kɤɣ "to bend," ŋgɤɣ "to be bent" (*-k), and |kik| / |ghik| to Chinese 繫 kejH < *kˁek-s, 系 ɦejH < *gˁek-s. 3The comparison with Japhug shows that the voiced aspirated form corresponds to the anticausative prenasalization; therefore these examples should not be accounted for by assuming the existence of a causative prefix *s-in the transitive form.

In addition to these forms, the anticausative verbs |ghuk| and |ghɛn| derive causatives in -t |ghukt| and |ghɛnt|, whose meanings are nevertheless different from the base transitive verbs. Thus, while |kukt| can mean "bend a bamboo into a tweezer" and "hurt people' feelings," |ghukt| has a more predictable meaning of "to bend" (as the snow bends a branch, for instance); while |kɛnt| means "bore, drill (wood)," |ghɛnt| rather means "make a hole (as a rat gnawing through a sack of rice)."

These secondary causative derivations occur with anticausative verbs derived from transitive verbs with CVCt roots; there are however too few examples to determine whether a correlation exists between the possibility of double derivation and the fact that the base verb involves CVCt roots.

These verb pairs suggest that the contrast between plain voiced and voiced aspirated in Khaling might be of some importance to the reconstruction of proto-Kiranti: plain voiced would come from proto-Kiranti voiced stops, and voiced aspirated from proto-Kiranti prenasalized stops.4

Aside from these examples, we find the pair |plum| "to rinse in water" and |blum| "to sink." This pair differs from the preceding ones in two ways. First, the alternation is between unvoiced stop and plain voiced, instead of voiced aspirated. Second, the verb |blum| is actually transitive, but can only be used in inverse forms (as illustrated by example 1; this verb cannot be conjugated as an intransitive form *blʉm-ʌtʌ (sink-1sgS/O.pst) without the inverse prefix ʔi-.

(1) ku-ʔɛ water-erg ʔi-blʉm-ʌtʌ 2/inv-sink-1sgS/O.pst I sank in the water. This example, unlike the previous one, cannot be analyzed as an anticausative derivation. Its exact origin is difficult to ascertain without external comparanda in non-Kiranti languages. It is possible that here |blum| is the base verb and that |plum| is derived from it by *s-prefixation.

Conclusion

The applicative/causative and the anticausative forms are of great antiquity, and of considerable value for reconstructing proto-Sino-Tibetan morphology. Neither are productive, as they have been replaced by transparent periphrastic constructions. The productive reflexive, reciprocal, causative and benefactive constructions will be studied in forthcoming works.

  A comparison of some forms of the |op| and the |opt| paradigms, non past direct forms |mop| "grope" |mopt| "spill" leveling could easily lead to the merger of CVC and CVCt conjugation classes. Incidentally, in Khaling, as in Dumi (van Driem 1993), there are no transitive -n roots. In other words, all verb roots ending in -n are intransitive. If a transitive CVn paradigm did exist, it would be possible to mechanically apply the morphophonological rules described in[START_REF] Jacques | An overview of Khaling verbal morphology[END_REF] to predict the expected shapes. In table 4, we present a portion of the transitive |-int| paradigm together with the hypothesized forms of the transitive |-in| paradigm. Table 4: The |int| paradigm in comparison to the hypothesized transitive |-in| paradigm, non past direct forms *|thin| |thint| "wake (vt)" are identical except for a few forms. Thus, it is probable that the transitive CVn conjugation (which does exist in other Kiranti languages like Limbu) merged with the CVnt conjugation, and that all CVn verbs became CVnt verbs by way of analogical levelling (not sound change).

Table 1 :

 1

		Examples of recipient applicative in Khaling
	base form (it) meaning	applicative (tr) meaning
	|ŋur|	roar	|ŋurt|	roar at
	|bhur|	be angry	|bhurt|	scold
	|bhrot|	shout	|bhrott|	call
	|ret|	laugh	|rett|	laugh at
	|ŋin|	be afraid	|ŋint|	be afraid of
	|tshil|	be frustrated |tshilt|	be dissatisfied with
	|lem|	be sweet	|lemt|	coax

Table 2 :

 2 Examples of causative -t in Khaling

	base form (it) meaning	applicative (tr) meaning
	|ʔot|	come back	|ʔott|	bring back
	|ghur|	run	|ghurt|	drive, cause to run
	|tshɛ|	spread (intr)	|tshɛtt|	expand (vt)
	|thin|	wake up (intr) |thint|	wake up (vt)
	|pi|	come (level)	|pit|	bring (level)
	|bher|	fly	|bhert|	cause to fly

Table 5 :

 5 Alternation between unvoiced and voiced aspirated verb roots in

	Khaling
	Transitive Meaning	Intransitve Meaning
	|tsɛm|	lose	|dzhɛm|	be lost
	|tsɛp|	be able to do (sth) |dzhɛp|	be possible
	|kik|	tie	|ghik|	hang oneself by accident
				on a rope (of a goat)
	|phʉk|	wake up	|bhʉkt|	ferment (of alcohol)
	|kɛnt|	make a hole	|ghɛn|	get a hole
	|kukt|	bend	|ghuk|	be bent
	|phrok|	untie	|bhrok|	break

Interestingly, the only known trace of the -t suffix in Japhug involves the probable cognates of this pair: ɣi "come" (<*wi), ɣɯt "bring" (<*wit) in Japhug Rgyalrong.

A full investigation of this question is beyond the scope of this paper, and would involve a detailed study of the origin of the reflexive forms in Limbu, which present some idiosyncrasies in comparison to those of other Kiranti languages.

[START_REF] Baxter | Old Chinese: a new reconstruction[END_REF] reconstruct these forms slightly differently; we use here reconstructions which represent a later stage of Old Chinese, and which are not committal to any particular theory of Old Chinese reconstruction.

 4 Note that an additional series of voice stops should be reconstructed, where Northern

并讨论这些派生形态对原始汉藏 语构拟的贡献。 关键词:卡岭语、基兰提语支、应用态、反使动、使动态、名词并入、 类推

* This research was funded by the HimalCo project (ANR-12-CORP-0006) and is related to the research strand LR-4.11 ''Automatic Paradigm Generation and Language Description'' of the Labex EFL (funded by the ANR/CGI). I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for insightful suggestions.


Daniel Balageas

Daniel Boscher

Alain Déom

Franck Enguehard

Photoacoustic microscopy by photodeformation applied to thermal diffusivity determination


Karën Fort
email: karen.fort@paris-sorbonne.fr

Alain Couillault
email: alain.couillault@univ-lr.fr

Yes, We Care! Results of the Ethics and Natural Language Processing Surveys

Keywords: Ethics, Moral Buffer, Whistle Blowing Ethics in|by Natural Language Processing

We present here the context and results of two surveys (a French one and an international one) concerning Ethics and NLP, which we designed and conducted between June and September 2015. These surveys follow other actions related to raising concern for ethics in our community, including a Journée d'études, a workshop and the Ethics and Big Data Charter. The concern for ethics shows to be quite similar in both surveys, despite a few differences which we present and discuss. The surveys also lead to think there is a growing awareness in the field concerning ethical issues, which translates into a willingness to get involved in ethics-related actions, to debate about the topic and to see ethics be included in major conferences themes. We finally discuss the limits of the surveys and the means of action we consider for the future. The raw data from the two surveys are freely available online.

Natural Language Processing (NLP), like any other science, is confronted to ethical issues, both regarding the way science is conducted (plagiarism, reproducibility, transparency) and regarding the effects of its results on society. Moreover, the 21st century is witnessing major threats to citizens' privacy in which NLP techniques play a central role. The time has therefore come to gather and share our reflections on the impact of this evolution on the way we conduct our research. Indeed, NLP applications are often used to analyze and extract information from documents which, by their nature or their content, require thoughtful considerations regarding ethics. This is for example the case for all private content like Emails or suicide letters. It has been taken into account for a long time for medical corpora. Furthermore, the building, transformation or annotation of the (sometimes huge) language resources implies to set up and drive large scale projects involving human resources, thus generating potential issues with regards to working conditions. On the other hand, NLP is called for when it comes to providing tools for de-identifying documents, discovering plagiarism or performing fact checking, all applications that can be considered as ethically positive. This contrasted image of the domain has shown in the Journée d'études ATALA on ethics and NLP 1 and the TALN ETeRNAL workshop 2 that were organized last year in France. We decided to run a survey to try to understand better the needs and concerns of the community regarding ethics. A first poll was conducted within the French NLP community and its success encouraged us to run a second poll at the international level. We first give a rapid overview of the range of actions performed in the more or less recent past concerning ethics and 1. Previous Work 1.1. Ethics, Ethics Everywhere! Identifying the main ethical issues addressed in NLP publications is an impossible task, as ethical concerns appear in lots of articles, without being mentioned explicitly in the title or keywords. Obviously, there are exceptions, in particular articles from workshops on ethics, but also, interestingly, from people concerned by the technologies we develop. This is the case for the ethics of machine translation, which has been addressed by translators, who discuss example-based systems, underlying that they are the ones producing the precious original translations (and losing parts of their jobs), without their participation being acknowledged or rewarded [START_REF] Kenny | The ethics of machine translation[END_REF]. Some sub-domains in our field have had to face ethical issues for a long time. The most well-known case is that of speaker identification in speech processing and its usage in courts [START_REF] Bonastre | Person authentication by voice : A need for caution[END_REF]. Ethics is also a constant preoccupation for researchers working in the biomedical domain. This is reflected in the US by the NIH Ethics Training Program3 . Moreover, it was brought to our attention that researchers who create freely available language resources and tools have not only a practical goal, but also an ethical preoccupation. Another aspect of ethics in NLP is the very interesting research led on evaluation means and metrics, which allows to bring to light the limitations in the performance of our tools and techniques and the potential biases in their evaluation (see, for example [START_REF] Gonzalo | Benchmarking and evaluation campaigns: the good, the bad and the metrics[END_REF]).

Finally, popularizing NLP applications plays an important role in improving the awareness of the public and of the authorities concerning the potential dangers and limits of NLP tools. We want here to pay a tribute to our colleague Jean Véronis, who died recently and spent a lot of time and energy making accessible to the public the subtleties of some research issues in NLP through his well-known blog4 , which he created in 2004.

(Some) Recent Actions

Recently, some ethical concerns were raised concerning Amazon Mechanical Turk, in particular regarding the absence of a clear relation between the Requesters (people, including researchers, proposing a task) and the Turkers (workers), preventing the latter from any possibility of legal action from wrongdoings by the former [START_REF] Adda | Language resources and amazon mechanical turk: legal, ethical and other issues[END_REF][START_REF] Fort | Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold mine or coal mine?[END_REF][START_REF] Fort | Crowdsourcing for Language Resource Development: Criticisms About Amazon Mechanical Turk Overpowering Use[END_REF]). Another issue is that of the very low wages. In order to try and improve this situation, Chris Callison-Burch proposed a tool5 to help Turkers find higher paying jobs [START_REF] Callison-Burch | Crowd-workers: Aggregating information across turkers to help them find higher paying work[END_REF]. The reflection started on Amazon Mechanical Turk led some of us to involve private and public bodies in the writing of an Ethics and Big Data Charter6 (Couillault et al., 2014), whose aim was to document as much as possible the building of language resources and, more generally, of data. The charter consists in a form, split into three sections, respectively dedicated to traceability, legal and licensing issues, and specific requirements (i.e. related to the very nature of the resource content). While the charter has seldom been used for what it had been designed for (i.e. document language resources), we found out that talking and publishing about it and, hence, about ethics, rose interest, if not awareness, among researchers. As mentioned in the introduction, a Journée d'études ATALA and a TALN workshop were then organized on the subject of ethics and NLP, with a relatively large audience and very interesting papers. 7During the ETeRNAL workshop, it was suggested that, in order to try and bridge the gap between the real performance of NLP applications and the public perception of it and to share ethics-related experience and points of view, we should create a blog. The Ethique-et-tal blog8 was born. The surveys we present here are an extension of this work.

The Surveys

Motivations

We decided to run a survey in order to capture the point of view of NLP researchers and industrials on a number of subjects revolving around ethics. Our first goal was to evaluate the researchers' moral buffer, i.e. their attitude regarding the potential use of their research results. It then seamlessly extended to other issues. The questions could not prevent a certain bias towards a better concern for ethics, but it did allow for disagreement to be expressed, not only in the answers themselves, but also in the free comments (for example, 17 comments were added in the French survey). We first ran it in the French-speaking community, to check the technical and practical feasibility before extending it worldwide. For both studies, we used the LimeSurvey9 polling framework, a free tool10 that allows for the easy creation of anonymous on-line surveys. The survey contained three main types of questions related to (i) the research endeavor per se, (ii) the effects of research results and (iii) the willingness to get involved in ethics-related actions. Considering the high interest which arose during the French survey, we decided to drive a similar poll towards the international NLP community, using the same on-line tool, with similar questions. However, the questions differ slightly in the two polls, as we tried to improve them and their processing. We did remove questions that were not understood well by the respondents or that were too country-dependent, in particular a question regarding the notion of "fair use" (that does not exist in the French law).

Here again, the questions reflected our bias in favor of a better concern for ethics, but we are glad that people did not hesitate to express some disagreements in their answers and comments. However, it has to be noted that out of the 43 comments added to this poll, the large majority is surprisingly positive and pro-active (much more than the French ones), while a few criticize the form of the survey, i.e. the way we asked questions and the (limited) proposed answers. The raw results of both surveys are freely available11 , including the answers provided by those who did not finish the surveys and which we chose not to present here.

Participation

We advertised the French survey during the JEP-TALN 2015 conference, on the LN and Corpora mailing lists and through personal Emails. Despite some connection issues, a little more than 100 persons participated in the survey between June 23rd and July 30th (we had 212 participants, but experienced connections issues, so most of them had to re-connect). To evaluate the representativeness of the sample we compared it with the number of TALN participants in recent years, which ranged from 180 to 200. We therefore consider the French survey to be representative of the French-speaking NLP (text, speech and sign) community. Out of the 102 participants who finished this first survey, 28 respondents volunteered to get involved in ethics-related actions and left their Email addresses. We then ran a second poll aimed at the international NLP community. We advertised it on various mailing lists (LIN-GUIST, Elsnet, Corpora and LN again) and, from September 8th, 263 persons participated in this survey and 200 finished it. Given that the number of ACL registered participants has been around 1,000 since 2007 12 , our survey represents 20% of this community, which seems like a reasonable proportion. Again, out of the 200 participants, 73 people declared that they are interested in participating in a working group on ethics in NLP (31 gave their Email), which is very encouraging (see Table 1). It has to be noted that this second survey might underestimate the French-speaking community point of view, as some participants in the French poll did not participate in the international one, despite our warnings. This is why we present here a summary of the two surveys as of October 25th, 2015.

Results

The international survey returned results which did not differ much from the ones from the French survey, which lets us think that the question of ethics is quite independent of local laws, rules or habits. One question, though, returned different results from one survey to the other. To the question "Have you ever refused a project due to ethical issues?", 40.20% of the respondents in the French survey selected "Yes" while they were 23.50% in the international survey (see Figures 1 and2). As mentioned by some of the French survey respondents in their comments to this question, major efforts have been made at the European level to take ethical issues into account when submitting projects for proposal. For example, an ethics self-assessment form 13 has to be attached to all projects submitted for funding. This might be one reason for the differences between the French and international results.

The Researcher, the Politician and the Citizen

A large majority of researchers, in both surveys, consider that both citizens and politicians are not aware of the lim- Figure 2: "Avez-vous déjà refusé ou limité un projet pour des raisons éthiques ? / Have you ever refused a project due to ethical issues?" (French survey). its and possibilities of the tools we create. To the question "Do you think the public is aware of the limits and possibilities of the tools we create?", a large majority answer "No" (see Figures 3 and4). To the same question concerning the authorities (government, politicians, etc), a little less large majority answer "No". This is quite worrying as the former are directly concerned by applications which can potentially violate their privacy, sometimes on the authorities' demand.

No 91% I don't want to answer 2% Yes 7% Figure 3: "Do you think the public is aware of the limits and possibilities of the tools we create?" (international survey).

No

75%

No answer 20% Yes 5% Figure 4: "Pensez-vous que le grand public est conscient des limites des capacités des outils de TAL ? / Do you think the public is aware of the limits and possibilities of the tools we create?" (French survey).

Ethics in the Researcher's Everyday Life

Exploiting Research Results

A short majority of participants in the surveys consider that they are responsible for the usages of their applications (see Figure 6: "Pensez-vous que les pouvoirs publics sont conscients des limites des capacités des outils de TAL ? / Do you think the authorities are aware of the limits and possibilities of the tools we create?" (French survey).

Figure 7 and Table 2). This means that, although there is a moral buffer (and therefore room for awareness raising), researchers do care about the potential misuse of their results. However, some comments, especially in the French survey, show that a minority of researchers is doubtful about our role and responsibility, doubts which can be summarized with this quote "Let's bother about scientific issues and leave ethics in the hands of the users." 14 . Obviously, this key question would require a wider debate focused on NLP results exploitation.

Documenting Results

Regarding the researchers "day-to-day" behavior in their research project, the study confirms the results we witnessed in [START_REF] Couillault | Evaluating Corpora Documentation with regards to the Ethics and Big Data Charter[END_REF] with a real concern for licensing issues (see Figures 8 and9). However, although a majority of the participants declare 8: "In your projects, do you consider the licensing and distribution of your language data?" (international survey).

that they know how the data producers were remunerated in the projects they were involved in (see Figures 10 and11), we showed in [START_REF] Couillault | Evaluating Corpora Documentation with regards to the Ethics and Big Data Charter[END_REF]) that this information is almost never published. One explanation for this might be that they do not consider this as relevant for a scientific publication, so that encouraging researchers to do so could help lift the veil on our behavior as employers.

Training

Few academic programs seem to include a training on ethics (less than 20% in both surveys, with around 20 that are detailed in the comments), especially in France (less than 15%). This shows that there is room for improvement and sharing of good practices and that France is lagging behind on the subject.

Blowing the Whistle

A clear majority (63.00%) of the international participants (the question was not included in the French survey) declare that they do not know how to blow the whistle in Oui, c'est tout à fait mon rôle / Yes, it is definitely my role 40.20% C'est un rôle partagé par l'ensemble de l'équipe / It is a role which is shared by the whole team 34.31% C'est le rôle d'un des membres de l'équipe / It is the role of one of the team members 0.98% Mon sujet de recherche n'est pas pertinent pour cette question / My research subject is not relevant to this question 10.78% Non, ce n'est pas la responsabilité du chercheur / No, it is not the researcher's responsibility 23.53% Figure 10: "In the projects in which you participated, do you know how the data producers were remunerated?" (international survey).

case they witness a major ethical infringement in the domain (see Figure 14).

"I do not want to answer"

Respondents in the international survey had the possibility to choose "I do not want to answer". The ratio of respondents who chose this option varies greatly from one question to the other, ranging from 7.5% for the question "Are you ready to participate in a working group on ethics in NLP?" to 0% to the question "In your projects, do you consider the licensing and distribution of your language data?". It seems that the more a question requires self-commitment, or to give an opinion, the higher the ratio of "I do not want to answer". This might due to the fact that respondents are reluctant to talk about their opinion (and maybe to share it on-line).

Going Further

Discussion

We realize now that some of the questions in both surveys lacked context and were interpreted in different ways than expected (and probably differently by respondents). In particular, it seems that our question on whistle blowing ("Do you know of any way to blow the whistle (issue an alert) in case of a major ethical infringement in your domain?") was understood differently than expected. We have to admit that we had in mind government-related procedures 15 , whereas some comments from the respondents who answered "Yes" show that they understood it as ethical issues in colleagues' behavior (which is interesting too, but very different from our interpretation).

A question in the French survey, concerning the need for a "fair use" à la française was not understood by some of the respondents. We therefore do not present it here. Some comments in the international survey criticize the black-and-white possible answers we imposed in the international poll ("Yes", "No" and "I do not want to answer" for most questions) in order to simplify the processing of the survey.

Finally, the international participation rate seems fair, but more participants would obviously have been more satisfactory.

Overall, these issues are all linked to our hastiness in creating the surveys and running them in order to be able to advertise the French one during JEP-TALN 2015 and to have the international results ready for LREC. We believe that this time pressure is one of the (if not the) major causes of ethical issues in research, and that we should find ways to resist to this attraction, individually, and as a community.

What's next?

There seems to be a high demand for action, as shown by the answers to the question "Do you think that ethics should be part of the subjects in the call for papers" (see Figures 15 and16) and the relatively high number of people ready to participate to a working group (30 and 73 persons in the French and international polls, respectively). This encouraged us to move forward and take further actions in cooperation with other colleagues. Figure 16: "Pensez-vous que l'éthique doit faire partie des sujets de l'appel général de la conférence TALN ? / Do you think that ethics should be part of the subjects in the calls for papers of the conferences in our domain?" (French survey).

The Ethics and NLP blog we created is a first means of action, which allows researchers and industrials to express themselves on the subject of ethics and to popularize our real achievements and their limits. In parallel, we created a mailing list for French-speaking people interested in the subject, which will be enlarged to a wider community as soon as possible.

We have also worked on a second version of the Ethics and Big Data Charter and extended it to data sets pertaining to other domains or with specific constraints such as medical, health data or personal data. Finally, our proposal of a special issue of the TAL journal on Ethics and NLP has been accepted and a workshop dedicated to ethics, ETHI-CA 2 (ETHics In Corpus collection, Annotation and Application) will be held during LREC 2016.

Ethics should be shaped by the community itself, so let us gather and talk about it. Someone added the following comment in the international survey "I think the community is mature enough to have this conversation today". We do too! The LREC conference seems to us (one of) the perfect place(s) to start this discussion.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure1: "Have you ever refused a project due to ethical issues?" (international survey).

Figure 15 :

 15 Figure15: "Do you think that ethics should be part of the subjects in the calls for papers of the conferences in our domain?" (international survey).

Table 1 :

 1 Participation in the two surveys.

	Survey		French	International
	Date of the survey	July 2015 September 2015
	Number of participants	(212 -) 102	(263 -) 200
	Number of participants to TALN / ACL	200	1,000
	Number of declared volunteers	28	73
	No
	78.5%
	17%
	4.5%	Yes
	I don't want to answer
	Figure 5: "Do you think the authorities are aware of the lim-
	its and possibilities of the tools we create?" (international
	survey).
	No
	68%
		9%
		Yes
	23.5%
	No answer

Table 2 :

 2 "Vous considérez-vous responsable des utilisations faites des outils que vous développez ? / Do you consider yourself responsible for the usages imagined from the tools you develop?" (French survey).

	No answer
	12.75%	No
		19.61%
	67.65%
	Yes
	Figure 9: "Dans vos projets intégrez-vous dès le départ la
	possibilité de pérenniser et redistribuer vos données ? / In
	your projects, do you consider the licensing and distribution
	of your language data?" (French survey).
		I don't want to answer
	0.5%	No
		19.5%
	67.5%
	Yes	12.5%	NA

See: https://ethics.od.nih.gov/.

See: http://blog.veronis.fr/.

A browser extension, available here: http: //crowd-workers.com.

The charter is available here, in French and English: http: //wiki.ethique-big-data.org.

The papers (in majority in French) can be found respectively here: http://www.schplaf.org/kf/JE_ATALA.html and here: http://www.atala.org/taln_archives/ ateliers/2015/ETeRNAL/.

See: http://www.ethique-et-tal.org/.

See: https://www.limesurvey.org/en/.

LimeSurvey is distributed under the GPL licence.

See: http://www.schplaf.org/kf/pdf/ EthicsAndNLPResults.zip.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank here our colleagues who participated in the many reflections on ethical issues during the Journée d'études, the ETeRNAL workshop and after, in particular Gilles Adda (LIMSI-CNRS/IMMI), Maxime Amblard (University of Lorraine/LORIA), Jean-Yves Antoine (University of Tours/LI) and Hugues de Mazancourt (Eptica). We also thank the LREC reviewers, who gave us some useful and precise advice to improve this paper.

Appendix

Table 3 summarizes the results for each survey. Note that the second question (concerning whistleblowing) was not asked in the French survey. Moreover, the possible answers to the first question were different in French:

• Oui, c'est tout à fait mon rôle / Yes, it is definitely my role (40.20%)

• C'est un rôle partagé par l'ensemble de l'équipe / It is a role which is shared by the whole team (34.31%)

• C'est le rôle d'un des membres de l'équipe / It is the role of one of the team members (0.98%)

• Mon sujet de recherche n'est pas pertinent pour cette question / My research subject is not relevant to this question (10.78%)

• Non, ce n'est pas la responsabilité du chercheur / No, it is not the researcher's responsibility (23.53%)

We regrouped the first three answers into "Yes" in the following table and we did not put the fourth one. Also note that "No answer" corresponds to slightly different answers in the two polls. In the French survey, this covers the cases where LimeSurvey did not register any answer, except in the first question, where it corresponds to "My research subject is not relevant to this question". In the international survey, this corresponds to "I don't want to answer" and "N/A" answers (when applicable).


Ding Guillaume

Review of 'A grammar of Pumi' by Picus

Introduction

The year 2014 saw the completion of two important monographs on Pumi: the book under review [START_REF] Ding | A grammar of Prinmi[END_REF]) and Daudey (2014a)'s dissertation, defended at LaTrobe University. These two typologically-informed and corpus-based grammars represent a welcome improvement over previous descriptions of Pumi [START_REF] Fù | 普米語動詞的語法範疇 Pǔmǐyǔ dòngcí de yǔfǎ fànchóu (The Categories of the Pumi Verb)[END_REF][START_REF] Lù | 普米語方言研究 Pumi ̌yǔfangyań yańjiū(A study on Pumi dialectology)[END_REF] which were essentially based on elicited sentences. While the scope of these two grammars is similar, they are by no means redundant, since they describe quite distinct varieties of Northern Pumi, and are based on different text corpora.

The book under review is partially based on the author's PhD dissertation [START_REF] Ding | Fundamentals of Prinmi (Pumi): A Tibeto-Burman language of northwestern Yunnan: Australian National University dissertation[END_REF] -incidentally also under D. Bradley at the Australian National University). It represents however a considerable improvement over Ding's previous work on several accounts.

First, the corpus has been considerably enlarged, in particular by data collected in a series of field trips in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Second, the analysis of tones and tonal alternations (chapter 3) considerably gained in sophistication and readability, and fully integrates recent research on Pumi tonology [START_REF] Matisoff | Dayang Pumi phonology and adumbrations of comparative Qiangic[END_REF][START_REF] Ding | The pitch-accent system of Niuwozi Pumi[END_REF][START_REF] Ding | Prinmi: a sketch of Niuwozi[END_REF][START_REF] Ding | A typological study of tonal systems of Japanese and Prinmi: Towards a definition of pitch-accent languages[END_REF][START_REF] Ding | The Use of Perception Tests in Studying the Tonal System of Prinmi Dialects: A Speaker-centered Approach to Descriptive Linguistics[END_REF], Jacques 2011b).

Third, the description of syntax (chapters 9 to 12) has been thoroughly rewritten and enriched with new data.

Since another review of Ding's book already presents a general overview of each chapter in detail [START_REF] Daudey | Review of 'A Grammar of Pumi[END_REF], the present work focuses on three topics: the contribution of this work to Pumi dialectology and to linguistic typology, as well as a few issues concerning the treatment of Tibetan loanwords.

Dialectology

Although this grammar is primarily the synchronic description of one variety of Pumi, the dialectological context is fully integrated. The book starts (pp.8-9) with a brief overview of dialect classification based on phonological innovations, and discusses data from dialects other than Niuwozi (either from the author's own fieldwork or published sources) whenever appropriate.

The features used in the author's classification are well-chosen; another important sound change that could have been included is the fate of proto-Pumi s+stop/affricate clusters as stops/affricates or as fricatives. As shown in Jacques (2011a), the proto-Pumi cluster *stfor instance becomes an aspirated fricativein Shuiluo vs tin Mudiqing. Relatively few dialects belong to the Shuiluo-type; in [START_REF] Lù | 普米語方言研究 Pumi ̌yǔfangyań yańjiū(A study on Pumi dialectology)[END_REF]'s data, only Taoba and (for some items) Ludian dialects present fricatives corresponding to Proto-Pumi s+stop/affricate clusters (see items 166 and 582 for instance).

The Niuwozi dialect described in this grammar presents a combination of innovative and archaic features.

From the point of view of phonology, the Niuwozi dialect is generally more conservative than the Wadu variety, which does not preserve any clusters (Daudey 2014a, 20-1). It sides with dialects such as Mudiqing in its treatment of Proto-Pumi *s+stop/affricates clusters. The author describes several ongoing sound changes (pp. 45-8), such as the debuccalisation of voiceless nasals (n̥ > [h ̃]) with spread of nasality onto the following vowel [START_REF] Michaud | Historical transfer of nasality between consonantal onset and vowel: from C to V or from V to C?[END_REF] provide a typological overview of sound changes of this type, using among others data from Na languages in contact with Pumi) and the debuccalisation of the voiced velar obstruents to [ʔ], which have already been brought to completion in other varieties.

On the other hand, the verbal morphology of the Niuwozi dialect appears to be slightly more innovative than other dialects. While the Shuiluo and Wadu dialects have a very productive <w> non-egophoric infix (Jacques 2011b, Daudey 2014a, 338, Daudey 2014b, 80), in the Niuwozi variety this infix appears to be fossilized and only retained in a handful of verbs as non-productive stem alternation (p.121).

Typology

The rich and original data in this grammar make it a contribution to tonology and morphosyntactic typology. Pumi is especially interesting in having an Tibetan-like egophoric system in combination with remnants of a system of polypersonal agreement. 1 It is fortunate that this unusual system could be adequately described and thus contribute to the typology of evidentials and their complex relation to person marking.

While some important references on evidentiality appeared too late for the author to use (Tournadre & LaPolla 2014 in particular), it is unfortunate, since the term 'mirative' appears in this grammar (p.211-2), that the recent debate about this term in Linguistic Typology is not discussed [START_REF] Hill | Mirativity" does not exist: hdug in "Lhasa" Tibetan and other suspects[END_REF][START_REF] Delancey | Still mirative after all these years[END_REF][START_REF] Aikhenvald | The essence of mirativity[END_REF]; the unfortunate neologism 'surprisive' (p.214) could have been avoided.

Another domain of morphosyntax where Pumi grammar is particularly interesting is information structure, and the author's rich corpus data allow a detailed and valuable description of topic and focus in this language (pp. 155-161 and pp. 297-317). Typologists interested in this domain of research can now include Pumi to their field of investigation.

Tibetology

My only reservation about Ding's work is the near complete absence of any reference to the Tibetan cultural heritage of Pumi people, and the deep influence of Tibetan on the language. This is not simply a matter of detail, as not properly recognizing Tibetan loanwords leads to incorrect translations. For instance, on p.184 the noun sõHd e H is translated as 'Shakyamuni'. However, it is clearly borrowed from Tibetan sa s.rg as 'Buddha' -although Shakyamuni is a buddha, other deities such as the Bonpo Gshen.rab Mi.bo are also called sa s.rg as in Tibetan.

This problem is particularly clear in the sample text on the wealth god Dzam.bha.lha (appendix 1), where Tibetan words are left untranslated. For instance d ja L k F from rg a.gar 'India' is simply rendered as 'Jjiaga people' in English).

Conclusion

Picus Ding's grammar of Pumi is an important event in Sino-Tibetan linguistics, and will remain a lasting reference on the study of this language.

It is hoped that the author will make his corpus of glossed texts available to the linguistic community,2 and that he will continue to do research on Pumi, for instance studying in more detail information structure using the methodology he applied to Cantonese in his recent article [START_REF] Ding | Word Order, Information Structure and Intonation of Discontinuous Nominal Constructions in Cantonese[END_REF].

In particular, it is possible that the non-egophoric <w> infix originates from an inverse marker cognate with the one found in Rgyalrong languages, such as the wprefix in Zbu(Gong

2014); note that in Khroskyabs and Stau, the inverse prefix has been generalized to all transitive non-local forms and reanalyzed as a type of transitive marker (?[START_REF] Jacques | Person marking in Stau[END_REF].

The Pangloss archive[START_REF] Michailovsky | Documenting and researching endangered languages: the Pangloss Collection[END_REF]) already contains a small Pumi text corpus collected by the author of this review, that could be enriched with additional data.