Aurélien Bossard

Michel Généreux

Thierry Poibeau

Description of the LIPN Systems at TAC2008: Summarizing Information and Opinions

Introduction

The Text Analysis Conferences (TAC) offer a unique occasion to show innovative approaches to text summarization. As a first incursion into this new research area, LIPN participated in the following tasks of TAC 2008: the Update Summarization task and the Opinion Summarization task. LIPN systems obtained good results for Opinion Summarization; however, we are confident that there is room for improvement, especially for the systems that did not perform so well on the Update task.

This paper gives a technical description of the systems developed. Algorithms and results are then briefly discussed for the different tasks we participated in.

In the first section, we describe the LIPN1-Opinion system for Opinion Summarization, which is based on an adaptation of the MEAD system [START_REF] Radev | Centroid-based summarization of multiple documents[END_REF]) integrating a sentiment analysis component. We then describe a series of other systems based on an original clustering-based summarization algorithm called CBASES, which has been applied to the Update as well as to the Opinion Summarization tasks.

LIPN1-Opinion: Summarizing Opinionated Blog Posts

We propose here an approach which combines traditional summarization with sentiment detection. Our system's overall architecture is not without resemblance to MEAD [START_REF] Radev | Centroid-based summarization of multiple documents[END_REF]), a technique that is centred on the computation of cluster centroids to evaluate a sentence relevance to a set of clustered documents. Although our approach relies only incidentally on centroids, our system has preserved a few other recognizable aspects of MEAD, such as a certain number of feature computations and re-ranking. Our system departs mainly from MEAD in a number of ways: the inclusion of sentiment analysis to account for opinionated texts, computing of a score for additional relevant features, post-processing (merging) sentences as well as experimenting with similarity measures other than the usual cosine.

How the runs were produced

There are three elements which serve as input to the summarizer: the XML targets/questions/documents file associates each target:question to a set of relevant blog posts, the posts themselves, and a few optional snippets of answers to each queries drawn from the blog posts and provided by TAC.

Cleaning Each XML formatted blog posts goes through boilerplate stripping as well as a basic screening to discard noisy input. Sentences with a ratio:

number of frequent words/total number of words below a given threshold (0.35) were deemed too noisy and discarded. Frequent words are the one hundred most frequent words in the English language which on average make up approximately half of written texts [START_REF] Fry | The Reading Teachers Book of Lists[END_REF]. Computing Features Once we have clean data, we are in a position to compute a number of relevant features for each sentence. There are nine distinct features: sentiment, isLongestSentence, sim-ilarityWithTarget, similarityWithQuery, similarity-WithFirstSentence, similarityWithSnippets, centroid, length and position. Details of the computation of each feature can be found in section 2.2. Clustering This step aims at creating clusters on the basis of the test data. The test data provided a list of blog posts for each target in which answers to queries could be extracted and summarized. Consequently, each cluster gathers blog posts associated with a unique target:query combination as provided with the data 1 , resulting in a total of forty-eight clusters. Query Classification The clusters were further grouped in two categories according to the sentiment expressed or sought after in the query. Two broad categories were considered: positive and negative. Therefore, a two-class SVM classifier was developed and trained on the manually tagged queries from the training data provided earlier in TAC. The idea behind the grouping of clusters is to improve summaries by selecting sentences having the same opinionated polarity as the query. Summarizing The selection of relevant sentences for summarization is based on a weighted sum of feature values. To avoid including very short sentences in the summary, sentences of length (in words) below a predefined threshold (10) were given a score of zero 2 . Otherwise, the scoring formula is as follows:

n i=0 w i * f i (1)
where w i represents the weight of feature f i . For -10 -10

Table 1: Feature weights

We can see that an important weight was attributed to sentences with a high degree of similarity with the snippets. Long sentences were marginally penalized.

A negative sentiment weight for negative queries can be explained by the fact that the value of a negative sentiment feature was -1. Re-ranking Before being selected for the final summary, highly scored sentences go through a re-ranking

1 For example, there were ten documents in the cluster 1001.2 for the target Carmax and the query What motivated negative opinions regarding purchasing a car from CARMAX?

2 After careful examination of the nuggets size, a more advisable upper limit would have been much less than ten words.

phase to avoid repetition. Starting from the highest ranked sentences, the re-ranker only inserts a highly scored sentence into the summary if the summary current compression rate has not yet fall below its compression requirement and the sentence is not too similar (is below a threshold of similarity) to any of the sentences already in the summary. The side effect is that the final compression ratio may end up above requirement. We have set our target compression rate to 25 sentences. Merging At this point we have 48 distinct target:query clusters which have been summarized. The final task is to merge clusters with the same target. This process involves ranking sentences according to their original position in the summary to eliminate redundant (that is too similar) sentences in the same fashion as we did in re-ranking. The final result is 25 summaries corresponding to the 25 targets (reduced to 22 by the examiners).

Feature computation

This section presents the computation methodology for each of the eight sentence features. sentiment We have attempted to give each sentence a meaningful positive or negative polarity by using a supervised approach where a set of labelled documents were used for training two SVM classifiers, one for categorising queries and one for categorising sentences from blog posts. Queries had rather regular structures with a few repetitive patterns that could be learned rather easily using only a few training queries. The queries provided in an early TAC release of a sample queries served this purpose. The learned classifier was then used to classify each query of the test data. The classification of sentences from the blog posts presented a rather more challenging task, given the variable length, structures and domain targeted. All these obstacles were arguments to adopt the following safer, although not necessarily more accurate, strategy: a document classifier was built to classify each blog posts, in which each sentence was attributed the same polarity as the blog post itself. The document classifier was trained on the self-annotated movie reviews corpus3 freely available online. The assumption behind this simplification is that blog posts tend to express views which are rather unbalanced, leaning most of the time towards one particular pole of the sentiment scale, which leads to sentences sharing the same polarity as the overall post. Negative sentences were attributed value -1 and positive sentences value +1. isLongestSentence The longest sentence for each post is attributed a value of one, zero otherwise.

similarityWithTarget The lexical/semantic similarity (see section 2.3) of a sentence and the target is attributed a value between zero and one. similarityWithQuery The lexical/semantic similarity of a sentence and the query is attributed a value between zero and one. similarityWithFirstSentence The lexical/semantic similarity of a sentence and the first sentence of a post is attributed a value between zero and one. similarityWithSnippets A list of snippets were provided for each target. A snippet was a piece of information responding to the information need of queries and the snippets provided by NIST contained all the nuggets used in the evaluation. Each sentence was attributed a value of similarity between zero and one corresponding to the similarity with the most similar snippet. centroid The centroid value measures how significant a sentence is with regards to other sentences in a text, based on the TF*IDF technique. The centroid of sentence s is calculated as follows:

centroid s = word tf word,s * idf word,s (2)
The final centroid value for a sentence is normalized to a value between zero and one by dividing each centroid by the highest centroid in the text. position This value reflects how close to the top (sno = 1) of the text sentence s is located.

position s = 1/sno s (3)

Similarity measure

A summarization system based on sentence selection relies heavily on its ability to compute precisely and effectively a large number of similarity values between sentences. One such measure has enjoyed a great deal of popularity, because it is conceptually simple and computationally attractive: the cosine measure of similarity represents sentences as weighted vectors of TF*IDF and similar vectors are simply those separated by a small angle. The only extrinsic resource needed is a good lexicon of IDF values for each word. TAC is a good opportunity to look at two slightly more refined alternatives in computing sentence similarity involving word order and the use of a lexical database 4 . As opposed to the cosine measure that models sentences as a bag of words, the Levenshtein distance [START_REF] Ristad | Learning string-edit distance[END_REF] does consider word order by attributing a penalty to operations aiming at transforming one sentence into another: insertion, deletion and replacement of words.

In the basic version of the method, each operation is worth a penalty of one. In the more advanced version, the penalty for replacement is commensurate with 4 Wordnet: http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ the continuous value of semantic dissimilarity between two words, based on a measure of relatedness (Pedersen, Patwardhan, & Michelizzi 2004) of two words by comparing the glosses of each in Wordnet. Other approaches that use Wordnet and the Levenshtein distance to classify paraphrases can be found in [START_REF] Brockett | Support vector machines for paraphrase identification and corpus construction[END_REF].

To provide a comparison as objective as possible, we have computed similarity values for the Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus5 which consists of 4076 paraphrases (1323 fair paraphrases FPs and 2753 good paraphrases GPs). The paraphrases in the corpus were constructed on the basis of news sources from the web, and each paraphrase was annotated by humans indicating whether each pair captures a paraphrase/semantic equivalence relationship. Unlike blog posts, which consist mostly of opinionated texts, the paraphrases from the corpus are by and large factual in nature, which limits the scope of the conclusion we can make about the use of such similarity measures for our task.

The corpus was completed with 4076 pairs of phrases not paraphrase of each other (NPs). Pairs of phrases 4, 5 and 6 are examples of non-paraphrases, fair and good paraphrases respectively. The similarity values computed using the three methods are also provided with each example. (4) A 1991 Florida straw poll helped catapult a little-known Bill Clinton to national prominence. / Two Democrats, Sen. Charles Robb of Virginia and Wendell Ford of Kentucky, voted with the 40 Republicans. (levenshtein = 0.00, levenshtein+wordnet = 0.03, cosine = 0.00) (5) Under the settlement, Solutia will pay $50 million in equal installments over a period of 10 years. / Under the agreement, Solutia will pay $50 million and Monsanto will pay $390 million. (levenshtein = 0.41, levenshtein+wordnet = 0.22, cosine = 0.32) (6) EU ministers were invited to the conference but cancelled because the union is closing talks on agricultural reform, said Gerry Kiely, a EU agriculture representative in Washington. / Gerry Kiely, a EU agriculture representative in Washington, said EU ministers were invited but cancelled because the union is closing talks on agricultural reform. (levenshtein = 0.19, levenshtein+wordnet = 0.21, cosine = 0.96) We can see that the corpus includes paraphrases using different word order (see 6) and/or semantically related terms (see 5, settlement vs agreement).

We have measured similarity for each of the three groups (NPs, FPs and GPs) using the three methods described above (cosine, levenshtein, leven-shtein+wordnet).

The mean and variance N(µ,σ 2 ) for all similarity values of the three groups are presented in table 2. First, we note that all average values of similarity are consistent with the level of gradation for each groups, non-paraphrases having the smallest values while good paraphrases the highest values of similarity. Dispersion around the mean is roughly the same, except for nonparaphrases, that have significantly lower dispersion. This is partly due to the fact that they are bound by zero on the left, but this also reflects the fact that all three methods won't find any similarity when there is none. On the other hand, all methods appear to miss a few similar semantic cues among paraphrases, which explains a larger dispersion around the mean for paraphrases.

Some experiments [START_REF] Leite | Extractive automatic summarization: Does more linguistic knowledge make a difference?[END_REF]) have shown that specific areas of document summarization may benefit from the use of more linguistic knowledge. However, our results show that there does not seem to be any improvement in the measurement of similarity when we consider word order and include a more refined measure of similarity between each word. In fact, the cosine method provides a greater range of values for similarity, a characteristic that shows a better ability to separate paraphrases from non-paraphrases. Therefore, we have adopted and integrated the cosine measure as part of our summarizer, and set a similarity threshold of 0.7 for detecting paraphrases.

Discussion of evaluation results

As can be seen table 3 If we give each of the six categories the same weight, then LIPN1-opinion is ranked first with an average score of 0.492 (last:0.290). It is interesting to examine more in depth the results and look for insights into the summarization of opinionated texts. Our featureoriented system lends itself naturally to evaluation as weights can be modified to see how discriminative the corresponding feature is. Ideally all the manual evaluation from TAC should be repeated for each relevant combination of features we wish to evaluate, however this is a labour intensive task clearly beyond our means. The alternative is to use off-the-shelves stateof-art automated evaluation software: ROUGE7 provides a widely accepted approach to evaluate a summary against a set of gold standard summaries. For our purpose gold standard summaries are built by concatenating all nuggets for a specific target. A legitimate concern with this strategy is how well ROUGE evaluation correlates with the PYRAMID evaluation adopted in TAC. Table 4 shows that for all the targets of our run LIPN1-opinion, ROUGE correlates only weakly to PYRAMID F-measures (coefficient of correlation is 0.23) However, ROUGE presents the same basic behaviour to PYRAMID, so that a summary covering only and only a subset of the nuggets will have lower recall and unit precision, while a summary covering all nuggets and more will have unit recall but lower precision. Other summaries will exhibit behavior between these two extremes.

We wish to evaluate the impact of each features on the summary evaluation measures by varying the weight associated with each feature. To make comparison possible, we vary weights from the basic configuration used in the submitted run (see section 2.1) and which is represented by the middle row for each of the feature types in table 5. Sentiment Analysis Let's recall that our basic strategy to match the polarity of each sentence from the blogs to a pair target:question was to assume that the sentence would share the same polarity as the blog itself. In view of relationship between sentiment weight and evaluation scores, it seems that in the domain of summarization at least, the assumption may not hold. Given that the assumption can be apparented to an approximation, this does not entail however that sentiment analysis per se is not useful for summarizing opinionated documents. To get a more complete picture of the use of sentiment analysis, a more comprehensive method of labelling sentences for sentiment is necessary. Longest Sentence The idea here is to avoid populating summaries with long sentences, which we hypothesize could adversely affect readability. This does not seem to be the case. Similarities with Target and Query The inclusion of similarity scores between the blog sentences and target or query follows from the observation that the main topics in the target (e.g. Carmax ) and the query (e.g. What motivated negative opinions regarding purchasing a car from CARMAX? ) tend to be repeated in opinions expressed toward the subject matter. This is probably true for targets, but probably not to the same extent for queries, as is exemplified by the following nugget (e.g. It costs more to purchase a car from CARMAX than from other used car dealers). Similarity with First Sentence Works on summarizing factual documents has shown that the first sentence often captures essential elements of the whole text. However, the contribution of such sentence appears of no use in evaluation measures of summary content for opinionated texts. Snippets Similarity Of all the features, we have substantial evidence that comparing our candidate sentences with the snippets by TAC has had a positive influence on the results. Although not surprising, to tap efficiently into this feature requires the use of a decent text similarity method, while the rather modest contribution of the feature suggests that it is by no means the sole responsible for the good results of the system. Centroid Cluster Centroid clusters are at the very core of the traditional summarizing systems such as MEAD. Results show that although they seem to have improve recall slightly, a weight as high as 50 has not had any positive impact on precision and Fmeasures. One explanation is that the contribution of centroids is mitigated by the larger weight (and contribution) of snippets similarity, a feature not usually present in summarizing systems built around centroids. Position This feature is a generalization of the simWithFirstSentence feature to all sentences in a document. We observe that there is a weak inverse relationship between the position of the sentence and evaluation measures. This suggests that authors may keep their most striking comments until the very end? Compression Ratio By augmenting compression ration, i.e. by keeping a smaller number of sentences in the final summary, we tend to lower recall and increase precision, although not at the same rate so that the F-measure steadily increase as we compress the summary. As the relation between compression rate and F-measure does not show a gradual increase followed by a decrease (see

Concluding Remarks on the LIPN1-Opinion System

We have presented an architecture to summarize opinionated texts which combines fairly standard features for text analysis with more exploratory features ensuing from sentiment analysis. Given that our system has had very good results for evaluation measures for quality and content, we conclude that this combination appears to be a good starting point to capture key elements that authors wish to express in subjective texts such as blog posts. Although our post-mortem analysis showed that snippet snooping has had a undeniable positive impact on the results, we have offered some insights on each feature contribution to help out understand how the interaction of the parts played out together to produce proper summaries.

Around CBASES: A New Algorithm for Automatic Summarization

As presented above, LIPN1-Opinion was based on an adaptation of the MEAD system [START_REF] Radev | Centroid-based summarization of multiple documents[END_REF]) integrating a sentiment analysis component. We have performed a series of other experiments and runs using a new algorithm called CBASES, which has been applied to the Opinion Summarization track (LIPN2-Opinion) as well as to the Update Summarization track (LIPN1-Update). We also participated in the Update track with a baseline system (LIPN2-Update) to be able to compare the results obtained by LIPN1-Update with a more basic approach. We obtained surprising results since CBASES performed quite badly on the Update task but gave interesting results on the Opinion Summarization task, without using the snippets. In what follows, we first give a description of CBASES, our summarization algorithm. We then describe the results obtained for the different tracks.

CBASES: A Clustering-Based

Sentence Extractor for Automatic Summarization

We assume that redundant pieces of information are the most important thing in order to produce a good summary. Therefore, the sentences which carry those pieces of information have to be extracted. Detecting groups of sentences conveying the same information is the first step of our approach. The developed algorithm first establishes the similarities between all sentences of the documents to summarize, then apply a clustering algorithm -fast global k-means (Lopez-Escobar, Carrasco-Ochoa, & Martinez Trinidad 2006) -to the similarity matrix in order to create clusters in which sentences convey the same information. Similarity between sentences is computed using a variant of the "Jaccard" measure. If two terms are not equal, we test their synonymy/hyperonymy using Wordnet taxonomy [START_REF] Fellbaum | WordNet, an Electronic Lexical Database[END_REF]. In case they are synonyms or hyperonym/hyponym, these terms are taken into account in the similarity calculation, but weighted in order to reflect that terms equality is more important than terms semantic relation. We do this in order to solve the problem pointed out in [START_REF] Erkan | Lexrank: Graph-based centrality as salience in text summarization[END_REF]) (synonymy was not taken into account for sentence similarity measures) and so to enhance sentence similarity measure. It is crucial to our system based on redundancy location as redundancy assumption is dependant on sentence similarities.

We cluster the sentences using fast-global kmeans (description of the algorithm is in figure 1). If it does not behave well on large data set, it works well on small data set, with a small number of dimensions. This algorithm is easy to adapt, and this will prove to be of use when working on slightly different tasks than automatic summary, such as "update task" of TAC campaign.

This clustering step completed, we select one sentence per cluster in order to produce a summary that contains most of the relevant information/ideas in the original documents. We do so by choosing the central sentence in each cluster. The central sentence is the one which maximizes the sum of similarities with the other sentences of its cluster. It should be the one that characterizes best the cluster in terms of information vehicled.

The overall process of our summarization system is shown in fig. 2. for all ejinE C1 ← ej for i from 1 to k do for j from 1 to i center(Cj) ← em|emmaximizes In this section, we present the results obtained by CBASES when applied to the summarization of opinions from blog (Opinion Summarization Pilot track). We first give information on how the runs were produced (we re-used some of the components described in previous 2) and then detail our results.

How the runs were produced

Snippets were not used for this system, as we want to keep a rather generic approach8 . Runs were produced as described below:

Cleaning XML formatted blog posts were cleaned as described in 2.1. Opinion tagging Using the method presented in the previous section (2.4), sentences are tagged as positive, negative or even neutral. Summarizing For each target, a summary is created using CBASES, which is detailed in section 3. Question tagging Each question is tagged as positive or negative, using a small lexicon we created which links a few verbs and adjectives to either a positive or negative trait. Negation also is taken into account.

The question is tagged as positive or negative depending on what feature prevails. Reranking Every summary is reranked: sentences are grouped into three different groups: the first two groups are for positive and negative tagged sentences, the third one for neutral sentences. Groups of sentences appear in the same order as the question: if the first question is tagged as positive, the first sentences will be positive ones.

Results

LIPN2-Opinion obtained quite good results on the "opinion task": it is ranked second for quality, fifth on semantic ranking, and third on overall results. However, we stated that the quality of our summaries is very erratic. We assume this is due to the length of our summaries, as the longest summaries are the ones which get the worst scores (fig 3).

Solutions to fix this problem could be: • Define a score for correspondence to user question and extract sentences which are above a threshold; • Extract sentences from the clusters that contain more than a predefined number of elements only. This would result in improving the pertinence of the extracted sentences.

Concluding Remarks on LIPN2-Opinion

We have presented above our approach for creating extract summaries. The system we used for opinion task obtained good results but can be improved by some post-processing methods. Other improvements could also be studied, such as:

• Taking into account the task for establishing a taskadapted sentence similarity measure;

• Studying Wordnet contribution: as shown in 2.2, use of Wordnet is not necessarily synonym to system quality improvement.

Update task: LIPN systems

The Document Understanding Conference (DUC) 2007 had introduced a new pilot task that fits well with new paradigms on document automatic summary. In TAC 2008, this pilot task, called "Update Task", consists of producing two summaries: the first one about a first group of documents, and the second one for information that represents novelty in a second group of documents.

In this section, we describe how we adapted our summarizing system, CBASES, to the update task and discuss the results and how they can be improved.

Managing Update

We have a summarizing system, CBASES, at our disposal. It is described in 3.1. This system clusters sentences from documents to summarize in order to create

LIPN1-Update: CBASES adaptation to update task

Detecting novelty is the first step in managing novelty. Detecting sentences in the second document set which are redundant with sentences in the first document set is the method we have chosen for that purpose. We consider that sentences are not conveying novelty if they are closer to sentences belonging to the first document set than sentences belonging to the second document set.

After having summarized the first document set (see fig. 2), we recomputed all sentence similarities after including the new sentences from the second document set. We then marked all sentences in the clustering first obtained as immobile. Using fast global kmeans, we continued the clustering adding new clusters, with the following constraints:

• the documents from the first document set must not be moved to another cluster;

Figure 5: Results of our system on the "Update" task

• the cluster centers from the first clustering must not be recalculated. Doing so, sentences from the second document set which are close to sentences from the first one are added to old clusters, whereas sentences which appear to bring novelty are added to new clusters. These new clusters are the ones we will select sentences for the second document set from. Fig 4 gives a view of our update system.

LIPN2-Update: A Baseline system

We wanted to compare our system to a basic system for sentence selection. The feature on which is based this system is sentence specialty: it selects sentences whose terms are close to the bottom of the Wordnet hierarchy.

Results Analysis

Results were surprising: CBASES (v0.1) obtained worse scores than our baseline. We identified two major problems:

• document set B summaries were inferior to document set A summaries in terms of precision and recall; • recall for all summaries was two times worse than precision. This was due to bad choices we made about building summaries: we chose to extract only sentences which are not alone in their cluster; this had the effect to reduce the size of document set B summaries and to lower recall for these summaries. We also chose to prefer summaries which do not exceed 100 words. For that reason, our system often preferred 60 words long to more than 100 words long summaries. That resulted in artificially lowering recall for document set A and document set B summaries.

We decided not to remove lone sentences, and to avoid getting sentences which do not fit the topic, we filter sentences featuring their similarity to topic.

We then adopted another strategy to produce summaries that are always 100 words long: we arbitrary chose to select seven sentences from each document set. That is enough to always get 100 words, and not too much as we will add noise to extracted sentences when increasing the number of clusters (CBASES v0.2).

The last change we made to our system was to extract from a cluster not the sentence closest to the centre but the sentence which maximizes similarity with a query (CBASES v0.5).

The results of the first version of our system and of the new ones are shown in fig. 5.

What is important to notice is that our system also obtained poor results in manual evaluation, for the same reasons as for automatic evaluation.

Concluding Remarks on LIPN1-Update

We presented in this paper our automatic summarization system. If the results obtained during the evaluation were disappointing, the corrected system behaves well. There are three ways CBASES can be improved furthermore:

• Improving query scores by introducing sentence position and features such as numerical expressions and query extensions;

• Sentence compression: deleting parts of the sentence which are not relevant;

• Introducing request extensions.

Conclusion

We have presented in this paper the system developed by LIPN for TAC 2008. We have obtained encouraging results, especially for the Opinion Summarization track. We are currently in the process of evaluating the different components of our systems, their relative performance and their contribution to the task. Since it was our first experiments in summarization and our first participation in TAC, we know that a lot of work remains to be done to improve the quality and the accuracy of our systems. We have presented in this document some proposals to enhance the overall quality of the different components and algorithms that remain to be tested.

  in E ej → C l |C l maximizessim(center(C l , ej) add a new cluster: Ci. It initially contains only its center, the worst represented element in its cluster. done

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Fast global k-means algorithm

Figure

  Figure 2: Summarization system

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Opinion task LIPN2 results

Figure 4 :

 4 Figure 4: CBASES Update system

Table 2 :

 2 Similarity methods compared

Table 3 :

 3 Evaluation resultsIf we group the results by content, fluency/readability and overall responsiveness 6 , then we have the following rankings:

	, our run (aforementioned LIPN1-
	opinion, identifier 19) obtained more than competitive
	results.
	Pyramid	Grammaticality
	0.393 F-measure	6.636 score
	(best: 0.534, last: 0.101) (best: 7.545, last: 3.545)
	Non-redundancy	Structure/Coherence
	6.818 score	3.045 score
	(best: 8.045, last: 4.364) (best: 3.591, last: 2.000)
	Fluency/Readability	Responsiveness
	4.591 score	4.500 score
	(best: 5.318, last: 2.636) (best: 5.773, last: 1.682)

Table 4 :

 4 Correlation between PYRAMID and ROUGE

Table 5 :

 5 Features impact

table 6

 6

			), it is not a sim-
	ple matter of choosing the rate corresponding to the
	highest F-measure. Instead, the appropriate rate is
	a matter of trade-off between high enough semantic
	recall while not impairing on the quality and read-
	ability of the results by sustaining an adequate level
	of precision.
	Feature	Nb. sent. Rec. Prec. F-sc.
	compression	010	0.441 0.301 0.335
	compression	025	0.622 0.177 0.265
	compression	050	0.719 0.103 0.173
	compression	075	0.767 0.072 0.127

Table 6 :

 6 Compression rate impact

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/pabo/ movie-review-data/

http://research.microsoft.com/research/ downloads/default.aspx

We group the different result categories as suggested in the README file provided by NIST with the results: 1. Content = Pyramid; 2. Fluency/Readability = Grammaticality, Non-redundancy, Structure/Coherence and Fluency/Readability; and 3. Overall responsiveness = Respon-

siveness 7 http://haydn.isi.edu/ROUGE/latest.html

It seems quite unlikely that in real conditions, a system can make use of queries, relevant documents and snippets. In our opinion, it seems more promising to imagine a search engine coupled with a summarization system, even if we have explored an alternative approach making use of the snippets in the system presented in section 2. Of course the snippets help getting more accurate results

Acknowledgement

This work has been conducted under the project Infom@gic as part of the French Business Cluster Cap Digital.


Pascale Hancart Petitet

Training Birth Attendants in India Authoritative Knowledge Social Forms, Practices, and Paradoxes

. When nothing is done to avert maternal death, natural mortality is estimated at 1,500/ 100,000 live births. 1 From the last decades of the 19th century, training of traditional birth attendants (TBAs) was one strategy implemented in various colonies in order to reduce maternal mortality. As described in Samiksha Sehrawat's chapter in this volume, India was no exception in the mobilization of TBAs in attempts to introduce safe childbirth practices. The issue of TBA mobilization offers a lens to observe the social construction and the social production of the hierarchy of knowledge in the field of maternal health and childbirth. This chapter interrogates the local and global processes of construction, legitimization and delegitimization, and political use of the knowledge of TBAs in the Indian context. The issue also offers a prism to analyse the long-running division between two conceptions of the body. One, reflecting World Health Organization (WHO) policies, sees the physical body as an essentially uniform construction across time and cultures, allowing biomedical obstetric knowledge to be applied everywhere. The second conception acknowledges that various determinants shape the variability of birthing systems. The issue of mobilizing TBAs offers a starting point for analysing how the authoritative knowledge (Jordan 1978) surrounding birth is channelled, experienced, and enacted. Here we use the theoretical concept of authoritative knowledge in two ways. Firstly, to examine how the Western biomedical system imposes

its authority in discrediting 'alternative' home-based healthcare practices. Secondly, to understand how recent Indian policies with respect to the location of birth have interacted with these alternative systems. More specifically we will observe to what extent the knowledge of rural women in India acquired through their lived experience is marginalized, challenged, and sometimes reinvented.

I draw on the analysis of the literature on TBAs, on my own experience of designing and implementing programmes aiming at reducing maternal mortality, as well as on my intensive ethnography conducted from 2003 to 2006, in Tamil Nadu, South India. My research involved observation and interviews with rural women of ex-untouchable castes (mainly Paraiyar, Arundhatyar, and Vannan) in villages neighbouring Pondicherry and Namakkal cities. Additional data from TBAs and biomedical caregivers were collected in a public district hospital, in a rural healthcare centre, and in a private nursing home [START_REF] Petitet | Transformations contemporaines des pouvoirs, des savoirs et des pratiques de Satchadie, matrone à Pondichéry[END_REF]. The chapter is organized in four sections. The first approaches briefly the different roles that trained TBAs have played in successive health policies. The second section aims to examine the plurality of discourses produced on TBAs. The third section provides ethnographical insights to document TBA training from the point of view of TBAs in Tamil Nadu. The last section describes the local interpretations of TBAs as a biomedical concept. Then it sheds light on the processes and the local forms of the reappropriation of TBAs' training by themselves and by their users. Here my aim is to show the heterogeneity of TBAs' social power, the eclectic modes of their practices, and their strategic use of training to enhance their positions.

Historical Facts and Health Justifications

With the assumption that biomedicine was capable of preventing the majority of maternal deaths, one of three WHO recommendations was to train TBAs in the basic principles of obstetrics and in the recognition of complicated delivery cases to be referred to health centres. 2 In 2004, after years of debates among the scientific and developmentalist communities related to the role of TBAs in the reduction of maternal mortality rates, WHO recommended stopping training activities targeting TBAs and gradually replacing them by training so-called skilled birth attendants (World Health Organization 2006). Until then TBAs were the targets of various development programmes and the subject of various social sciences research projects. But what were the representations and roles attributed to TBAs in the social history of the medicalization of childbirth in India?

In India, the first services involving the provision of healthcare during childbirth date from the beginning of the 19th century. In those days most deliveries took place at home with the assistance of a TBA or a member of the family and birth was described as a very welcome event for the pregnant woman and her family while also being considered a polluting and impure moment [START_REF] Good | The Female Bridegroom: A Comparative Study of Life-Crisis Rituals in South India and Sri Lanka[END_REF][START_REF] Jeffery | Traditional Birth Attendants in Rural North India: The Social Organization of Childbearing[END_REF]. Scholars have analysed the medicalization of childbirth as interrelated to various social movements: first the social reform movement in the 19th century and then the nationalist politics and colonial public health policies of the 20th century (Guha 2017). In Tamil Nadu, the Madras Lying-in Hospital played a pioneering role in maternity provision and midwifery training in India [START_REF] Lang | Drop the Demon Dai: Maternal Mortality and the State in Colonial Madras, 1840-1875[END_REF]. As in the other Indian states, TBA training also took place within the National Dai Training Scheme initiated during the sixth Five-Year Plan . The training had the objective to shape TBA practices during pregnancy and childbirth according to biomedical principles. As in numerous Southern countries, the training of TBAs has been centred mainly on the promotion of so-called safe practices (washing the hands, cutting the umbilical cord with a sterilized razor blade etc.) and the abandonment of practices deemed to be harmful (such as repeated vaginal examination, uterine massages during labour). The training proved to be mostly effective in reducing harmful practices and in raising positive post training practices. However, it had a very limited impact on maternal mortality because of the absence of any connection with a referral system by which complicated deliveries could be speedily transferred to healthcare facilities [START_REF] Saravanan | Traditional Birth Attendant Training and Local Birthing Practices in India[END_REF]). The 1994 report, ' Action Plan for Revamping the Family Welfare Programme in India' , brought out by the Ministry of Health and Family Affairs (Government of India 1994), also mentions the insufficient number of instructors, the lack of pedagogic materials, the maladapted, too technical, and too lengthy teaching courses, and the fact that TBAs' knowledge and skills were not taken into account in the training modules. However, in India and as in other Southern countries, it might have contributed to reducing the rates of perinatal death, stillbirth, and neonatal death [START_REF] Sibley | Traditional Birth Attendant Training for Improving Health Behaviours and Pregnancy Outcomes[END_REF]. Within the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) various reforms were implemented in maternal healthcare provision [START_REF] Srivastava | Putting Women At the Center: A Review of Indian Policy to Address Personcentered Care in Maternal and Newborn Health, Family Planning and Abortion[END_REF] including a new module for TBA training. This measure, mostly taken in order to supplement the unavailability of health workers in remote rural areas (Sengupta 2019), also aimed to improve the referral system between birth attendants and obstetric care centres.

Plurality of Discourses Pertaining to TBAs

The literature produced by public health experts and social scientists in India on the role given to TBAs in the establishment of public health services is abundant, not always based on scientific facts and, as elsewhere, contradictory. Two major opinions can be distinguished. Some support the benefits of the involvement of TBAs in the implementation of health programmes.

Others assume a position favouring the disappearance of them and their practices.

TBAs and Public Health Policymakers

What has been called 'the failure of the training of TBAs' regarding the objective of reducing maternal mortality rate is commonly acknowledged by decision-makers in international public health institutions, some researchers and some representatives of non-governmental organizations [START_REF] Berer | Tbas Cannot Be Expected to Carry Out HIV/ AIDS Prevention Activities for Women Giving Birth at Home[END_REF] who agree that when human resources of a level of medical competence higher than that of the TBAs are available, TBAs should be 'consigned to history and that is where they belong' . Some authors argue that investment in the training of TBAs may have had as its sole effect to delay, in countries with 'limited resources' , the establishment of adequate emergency obstetric services. TBAs do not have the ability to apply the measures required for the care of obstetric complication. Also, any TBA training has to be supported by the establishment of a referral system between 'the community' and the biomedical care services, which was rarely the case. By around 2000, the adopted consensus was that the proportion of deliveries made by 'skilled birth attendants' was the only reliable indicator to measure programme effectiveness. This term, from which even 'trained' TBAs are excluded, refers to the midwife, the doctor, or the nurse who has benefited from a theoretical and practical training [START_REF] Abouzahr | Maternal Mortality at the End of a Decade: Signs of Progress?[END_REF].

Parallel to these points of view, a fair number of those who are in favour of TBAs continue to believe strongly in the major role they play in the improvement of the health of mothers and children [START_REF] Ray | The Impact of Maternal Mortality Interventions Using Traditional Birth Attendants and Village Midwives[END_REF]. When and where the access to obstetrical services is limited, TBAs appear as OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF -FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Apr 12 2021, NEWGEN /12_first_proofs/files_to_typesetting/validation relays of biomedical health services. Some years ago, the transnational WHO recommendations envisaged the use of TBAs to reduce neonatal hypothermia and to prevent chlamydial ophthalmologic infection (World Health Organization. Maternal Health and Safe Motherhood Programme.1996). In the context of the spread of the HIV/ AID epidemic many initiatives have also been taken to involve TBAs in the prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV including giving to HIV infected mothers the short course treatment with nevirapine [START_REF] Hamela | Evaluating the Benefits of Incorporating Traditional Birth Attendants in HIV Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission Service Delivery in Lilongwe, Malawi[END_REF]). 3 Recently TBAs have been mobilized to use misoprostol to treat post-partum haemorrhage in home deliveries [START_REF] Abbas | Using Misoprostol to Treat Postpartum Hemorrhage in Home Deliveries Attended by Traditional Birth Attendants[END_REF]). 4 In India, TBAs were sometimes designated as the ideal actors for improving the perception and acceptability of contraceptive methods in rural areas [START_REF] Singh | Perceptions of Traditional Birth Attendants Regarding Contraceptive Methods[END_REF], or for the screening of pulmonary infections in their village and the administering of anti-tuberculosis treatment at the patient's home [START_REF] Balasubramanian | Feasibility of Utilising Traditional Birth Attendants in DTP[END_REF]. Several studies have demonstrated positive health outcomes among mothers and infants after training of TBAs [START_REF] Saravanan | Re-examining Authoritative Knowledge in the Design and Content of a TBA Training in India[END_REF], for example, the positive effects of neonatal resuscitation training on the survival of newborn babies [START_REF] Bang | Effect of Home-Based Neonatal Care and Management of Sepsis on Neonatal Mortality: Field Trial in Rural India[END_REF].

Some authors [START_REF] Pigg | Authority in Translation: Finding, Knowing, Naming, and Training "Traditional Birth Attendants" in Nepal[END_REF]) have also shown the obvious complexity of the limitation of the training of TBAs by underscoring the mistakes made during the implementation of the training: the lack of awareness of the social and cultural context of the birth as well as the employment of inappropriate pedagogic practices based mainly on didactic methods of instruction. The other deficiencies mentioned are the TBA's lack of social power (when, for example, she is supposed to make the decision to send a woman giving birth to the hospital) and the economic limitation of the referral decision (payment for transport and medicines). The limitations of the biomedical services may also stand as a determinant of the failure of the training of TBAs, given the lack of personnel, equipment, organization, and medicines [START_REF] Pendse | Maternal Deaths in an Indian Hospital: A Decade of (No) Change[END_REF]. Lastly, the applicability of the practices that women have been taught is also questioned.

Outside this sphere, circumscribed by biomedicine, TBAs are also at the centre of discussions related to the social production of hierarchy among medical systems. The protagonists of the movements in favour of TBAs tend to emphasize to representatives of the biomedical system the idea according to which the manners of treatment do not depend only on biomedical competence but also have to do with other forms of knowledge in which TBAs are judged to be skilful and experienced [START_REF] Chawla | Birth and Birthgivers: The Power Behind the Shame[END_REF]. At first, we propose a focus on the 'Natural Childbirth' promoters. Then some positions formulated by the 'Traditional system of medicine' defenders will be examined.

TBAs and 'the Traditions'

The 'Natural Birth' Promoters

The issue of training of TBAs must also be analysed in considering the criticisms of the biomedicalization of childbirth made by the defenders of natural childbirth. These positions come within a perspective of Western feminist movements stating that childbirth carried out in the biomedical milieu is a form of alienation of the female body by technologies (Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997). In this context, systematized care practices (such as the utilization of oxytocic drugs, electronic surveillance of foetal heart rate, uterine activity, and epidural analgesia) are perceived as making the woman an 'object to give birth' (Jordan in Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997). Notwithstanding a certain idealization of 'traditions' , this ideological interest has made it possible to shed light on the major drawbacks of the biomedicalization of birth.

In India from 2005, the programme Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) aiming to reduce the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) has contributed to an increase in the proportion of institutional births from 20% to 49% in 5 years [START_REF] Sabde | Bypassing Health Facilities for Childbirth in the Context of the JSY Cash Transfer Program to Promote Institutional Birth: A Cross-Sectional Study from Madhya Pradesh, India[END_REF]. Alongside the biomedicalization of birth, and mostly among the urban high and middle class, an increasing number of voices and initiatives have been raised to promote natural childbirth. For example, [START_REF] Mira | Her Healing Heritage: Local Beliefs and Practices Concerning the Health of Women and Children: A Multistate Study in India[END_REF] studied the TBAs' practices (use of medicinal plants, massages, food prescriptions, fumigations, etc.) in various states in India. Some activists suggest that childbirth should be understood as an everyday event for which the contribution of technology would not be justified. Gulati (1999) notes, in substance, that childbirth is an ancient event and that its process is 'as simple as breathing' . Nutan Pandit, who directs a birth centre in Delhi, has no training in obstetrics and introduces herself as a pioneering natural childbirth expert. She started teaching childbirth preparation in 1978, after experiencing two easy, normal deliveries herself. She asserts that 'Surely if nature has gifted fertility to women, it has also gifted the power of birthing. All women should have faith in their body's ability to birth a baby naturally' . 5 The organization MATRIKA (Motherhood and Traditional, Resources, Information, Knowledge and Action), led by Janet Chawla, a medical anthropologist, aims to index and to promote traditional delivery care, particularly in the states of Rajasthan, Bihar, Punjab, and Delhi [START_REF] Chawla | Birth and Birthgivers: The Power Behind the Shame[END_REF]). 6 Chawla OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF -FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Apr 12 2021, NEWGEN /12_first_proofs/files_to_typesetting/validation assumes that TBAs are an homogenous group of people and practices, and that the TBA, always seen as a sympathetic caregiver, takes into consideration the desires of the woman giving birth. Doctors, midwives, and nurses overuse technologies (foetal monitoring, episiotomy, forceps, caesarean section); they do not care about obtaining the consent of their patients for the decisions they make, and they give them no choice regarding the care received (Van Hollen 1998), or disrespect and abuse women during institutional childbirth [START_REF] Chattopadhyay | Safe", Yet Violent? Women's Experiences with Obstetric Violence during Hospital Births in Rural Northeast India[END_REF]) By contrast, a TBA is seen as facilitating the birth event by allowing the female body to express itself freely [START_REF] Ambica | Birth: In Whose Hands? Lifepositive[END_REF]. According to this current of thought, issues related to TBA training are off the subject: their 'traditional' know-how is sufficient to manage a 'natural' birth.

The Defenders of Indigenous Medicine

Numerous Indian organizations have established programmes with the objective of preserving and revitalizing indigenous medicine. In the 2000s, their stated aim was to fill the gap of the biomedical system and provide care accessible for vulnerable communities. 7 Among the multitude of projects and organizations, I will mention here the two largest. The Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems (CIKS) had the objective of 'exploring and developing the contemporary relevance and application of traditional Indian systems of medicine' . 8 Based in Chennai since 1995 and initially involved in Vrkshayurveda promotion (the ancient Indian plant science), CIKS has also developed activities in the field of organic agriculture and biodiversity conservation. Based in Bangalore since 1991, the Foundation for Revitalization of Local Health Traditions (FRLHT) is at the origin of the Institute of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine (I-AIM) and of the University of Transdisciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (TDU). 9 The representatives of the two organizations cited above put forward the benefits of the traditional system of medicines. They also argue that indigenous medical knowledge can compensate for the deficiencies of the Indian biomedical system and offset the endemic shortcomings of biomedical care. According to [START_REF] Hafeel | Monumental Heritage[END_REF], the recognition by international organizations of the interest in training TBAs, at that time, speaks in favour of the relevance of preserving the 'monumental heritage' of ancient medicines.

Since 2000, both CIKS and FRLHT have widely developed their activities respectively in organic agriculture/ biodiversity and for the institutionalization of the AYUSH systems of medicine. 10 Similarly to the position taken by international organizations, integrating TBAs into biomedical services is no longer a claim. This issue illustrates the various social forms of interrelations between the medical systems existing in both India and the West since the colonial period. As described by scholars [START_REF] Harrison | Medicine and Orientalism: Perspectives on Europe's Encounter with Indian Medical Systems[END_REF], the impact of Western medicine on existing health systems in India has indeed to be analysed as an agency, a complex interface that produced adaptation, assimilation, reinterpretation, or resistance.

To resume, the training of TBAs was seen as a special leitmotiv suited to satisfy, on the one hand, the obligations of international institutions in need of low-cost services favouring the health of mothers and children. For other organizations that defended tradition, the training of TBAs provided a good opportunity for recognition and access to national and international funding. TBA training was proposed in regions such as Ladakh, in Himalayan India, where TBAs 'traditionally' do not exist. In such a context, training TBAs has been seen as a cost-effective relevant strategy to provide healthcare to poor and remote villages.

After this exploration of the plurality of representations and discourses on TBAs in India from an 'etic perspective' , the second section of this chapter is dedicated to its examination on our field site, Tamil Nadu. Our aim is to question the construction of the authoritative knowledge in the sphere of childbirth by giving voice to TBAs themselves.

TBA Practices in Tamil Nadu: An Emic Perspective

In Tamil Nadu, TBAs or maruttuvacci, 11 have long been the main actors in the care of pregnancy and childbirth, mainly in the rural areas. In the context of the generalization of biomedical services, the continuation of their activities was linked to several factors: the social role, sometimes very important, that the community attributes to them; the meagre recourse to biomedical care among certain populations; and the absence of generalized distribution of these services in isolated rural areas. 12 Spouses of barbers (Ambattan) are often practising as TBAs. Other TBAs belong to untouchable castes such as Paraiyar, Arundhathiyar, or Vannan. 13 Mostly, those women came to occupy the role of TBA from one generation to the next, or more recently due to economic difficulties. Indeed, TBA used to be a hereditary occupational position but in a context of poverty the lack of job opportunities also led women to become TBAs, even if nobody in their family was involved in this field (see, for example, [START_REF] Jeffery | Labour Pains and Labour Power: Women and Childbearing in India[END_REF]. Moreover, the practices of TBAs are not always limited to care given during pregnancy and normal delivery. Some of them ). Some TBAs occupy a prominent place during ceremonies celebrating the events connected with reproduction. This is the case of the puberty rite of a girl, the mañcanīr, the rite of the seventh month of pregnancy, the valaikāppu (Hancart Petitet and Vellore 2007), and the tiṭṭukkaṛ ittal, the bath of purification given to the delivered mother and the newborn. Other TBAs know how to prepare the naṭ ṭ u maruntu, local remedies. Lastly, some TBAs from the Ambattan caste are able to recite the manrāṭ ṭam, ritual formulae used in order to move aside demons and bad spirits [START_REF] Petitet | Transformations contemporaines des pouvoirs, des savoirs et des pratiques de Satchadie, matrone à Pondichéry[END_REF]. Other TBAs also occupy broader roles in providing healthcare. The TBA Angelai, about 60 years old from the caste of Vannan paria, the untouchable caste of whiteners, told me: 'From the conjuration of the evil eye (drsti) during funeral, to the ritual where the tali is removed, I am present. It is not just that. I healed the foot strains, hip strains, neck strains, shoulder strains' (Hancart Petitet 2011a).

The low social status awarded to TBAs in India has often been described. The variability of this status exists and is not unrelated to the ambivalence of childbirth as both an auspicious and an impure event. Birth is also considered to be a good omen as it comes along with a change in the status of the delivered woman and of her relatives, especially if the newborn is a boy. Also, the tasks, the social status, and the decision-making power of TBAs vary according to geographic location, social position, and requirements of the family of the labouring woman [START_REF] Jeffery | Traditional Birth Attendants in Rural North India: The Social Organization of Childbearing[END_REF][START_REF] Pinto | Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural India[END_REF].

According to my observations in Tamil Nadu, TBAs mostly operate only inside their caste, or in castes of similar or lower rank. The blood and the products of excretion of the childbirth (amniotic liquid, stool, urine) are certainly considered as polluting. If certain TBAs are relegated to the world of the impure, others are respected and worshipped. One of the most reputed TBAs in the surrounding area was called a kula deivam (family deity). She was seen as very brave as she had no fear of performing very sensitive acts such as touching the blood of delivery, which used to be considered highly polluted: 'Contrary to the doctor at the hospital, who uses gloves, she is courageous. She makes the delivery with her bare hands. If she has to search for the placenta, she does not use an aspirator, she puts her hand directly inside' (Villager woman, near Pondicherry).

We now need to pay closer attention to the preference of villagers to use TBA services rather than to go to health centres and hospitals at the time of delivery. Those arguments, formulated by the women and their families and ignored by the detractors of the TBAs, plead in favour of a preference for home delivery. Home delivery indeed requires no preliminary preparation, prenatal consultation, blood test, or examinations, which multiply the visits to the centre of care and the expenses associated with this mode of therapeutic recourse. In Tamil Nadu, [START_REF] Ram | Medical Management and Giving Birth: Responses of Coastal Women in Tamil Nadu[END_REF] and Van Hollen (1998) pointed out reasons why women do not go to the hospital even if the TBA does recommend it. Indeed, people preferred not to go to the hospital because of previous bad experiences (delay in being attended by health staff, not receiving care at all, bad behaviour of staff). I observed that women would go to the primary healthcare centre for delivery only if they knew and trusted the caregivers posted there. Many women also spoke about the isolation and the solitude felt during childbirth in a biomedical environment. Very often, according to them, the nurses visit them only at the last moment of birth or sometimes even 'when everything is done and when the baby is already out!' About childbirth at home, on the other hand, the birth attendant Angelai recalled: 'Her relatives such as her aunts, sisters-in-law, sisters, mother and mother-in-law will stay with her. They will play tricks and mockeries to lead to forget her labour pain. They will say: "when you were happy with my brother, you said nothing, but you had pain isn't it? then you cannot bear this pain? eh!" ' (Hancart Petitet 2011b).

With the implementation of local strategies aiming to reduce the maternal mortality rate, new health actors appeared in villages: the auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM). ANMs, occupy the lowest rank in the Indian public health bureaucracy. They are young women recruited after the end of their tenth year of schooling and they receive 18-month's training. They oversee encouraging women from rural areas to go to hospital for the follow-up of their pregnancy and childbirth. Furthermore, they are expected to be responsible for the birth itself. The ANMs are posted in primary healthcare centres where they are supposed to live and to be on duty 6 days per week. However, absenteeism is common and ANMs operate various strategies to be able to justify it. In Rajasthan, [START_REF] Banerjee | Putting a Band-Aid on a Corpse: Incentives for Nurses in the Indian Public Health-Care System[END_REF] observed that ANMs overused the term 'exempt days' , which stands for any absence that is the result of a government-mandated meeting, survey, or other authorized health work. Let us give an example from our fieldwork. The TBA Palavankodie explained the modalities of her collaboration with the young ANM recently posted in her village: 'She [the ANM] asked me to record my home deliveries under her name. So I recorded fifty cases under her name. She told me that she would pay me 50 rupees for each one, but she still did not give the money to me' . Besides, as an economy measure, the villagers preferred to request the help of Palavankodie, despite the latter being forbidden to assist home births. In order to bypass this ban, Palavankodie is called only at the last stage of the labour when the time of expulsion is imminent. Such practice appears dangerous: no care is given to the woman during labour-while it is likely that certain remedies given by Palavankodie could be effective. Also, no one is present to diagnose obstetrical complications-while Palavankodie could identify some signs of the danger (Hancart Petitet 2013). Numerous variations exist among TBAs. They are mainly related to the various circumstances that led them to take on this role (caste origin, social events, economical need, etc.), to their social networks, and to their contacts with the biomedical system-many factors that determine the heterogeneity of their practices (see further below). However, TBAs are often perceived as constituting a homogeneous group of 'traditional' practitioners. Scientific, 'developmentalist' , 14 or ideological discourses regarding them are always constructed and developed based on this presupposition.

'Traditional Birth Attendants'

Local Interpretations of a Biomedical Concept

In the 19th century, colonial administrators, missionaries, and medical professionals had already grouped all the Indian TBAs under the appellation 'dai' [START_REF] Van Hollen | Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India[END_REF]. Such assumption leading to the invisibilization of plurality for the benefit of a normative homogeneity has been analysed by anthropologists. In the 1980s, and following Brigitte [START_REF] Jordan | Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden and the United States[END_REF], various researchers raised issues related to the construction of biomedical power as an imposition of normative values on birth. For example, they investigated popular versus biomedical birthing practices: position during labour and delivery; childbearing and newborn care, etc. They described how the implementation of the biomedical model of childbirth produced various coercive forms of control of the targeted population. It also shaped the subordination of indigenous medical practitioners to biomedical representatives [START_REF] Ginsburg | The Politics of Reproduction[END_REF]. Consequently, TBAs appeared on the scene of international public health as an invented, supposedly homogeneous category. The purpose of the appellation 'TBA' was to respond to a need for generalization required to transcribe international organizations' objectives in the language of transnational expertise (Pigg 1997: 233-362).

In international public health institutions, transnational expertise is exercised mostly without any sensitivity to local distinctions. The institutional need to find women to train as TBAs led to grouping together women who had quite different functions under a single generic term. Consequently, three categories of practitioners were presented as similar. The first included women whose social role in the community consists not only in the regular practice of childbirths at home, but also in providing treatments for diverse bodily afflictions as well as the performance of rites marking the different stages of life. The second category was represented by women who occasionally assist at their relatives' and friends' childbirths. The last group consists of women who never practised childbirth, but who were recruited in the training framework based on criteria such as age or level of education. At the end of common training, these women were supposed to carry out deliveries. All in all, they did not necessarily see themselves as 'TBAs' . They mostly saw the TBA training as an opportunity to learn new practices, to legitimize their own ones, to get social recognition or financial gain. In Tamil Nadu, criteria used in order to recruit TBAs vary according to districts. In a village near Pondicherry, a nurse responsible for the recruitment of TBAs for training told me:

We give training to the birth attendants of the village by taking their experience into account. It is necessary to have worked at least five years as birth attendant to take part in this training. If we come to know that the mother or child die during the childbirth attended by a birth attendant, we do not take this birth attendant who caused these deaths.

This quote illuminates one viewpoint of representatives of the biomedical system regarding the practices of TBAs. Those practices are mainly decontextualized from the social and economic realities underlying health practices. I observed, as did Davis-Floyd earlier, that TBAs are perceived by authorities and public health stakeholders as responsible for the high maternal and child mortality rates in their village. This attitude allows them to provide politically correct explanations on maternal mortality issues. Firstly, it minimizes the deficiency of infrastructure, such as the absence or bad condition of roads suitable for motor vehicles, the lack of transport and/ or resources. Secondly, such an explanation overlooks the previous bad experiences of women at hospital and their underlying causes, such as the lack of resources, poor training, and recognition of the staff. 15 Finally, the imputation of the responsibility for maternal mortality rates to TBAs leads to various difficulties when recruiting candidates to be trained. As the nurse cited above explains, the solution to recruiting TBA candidates is as follows: 'Finally, we train the girls who want to be trained. That is how birth attendants without experience take part in this training. After the training, they are called traditional birth attendants' .

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF -FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Apr 12 2021, NEWGEN /12_first_proofs/files_to_typesetting/validation

The social construction of the role of the TBAs is sometimes related to their previous training in the biomedical system. Indeed, that training may have provided benefits for women expecting upward social mobility. However, their role and status were also shaped by other factors such as the social function attributed to them by their respective communities before the training.

In some regions of North India, the birth attendants would be of inferior social standing. Their tasks are perceived as limited to the handling of waste matter from the delivery-blood, umbilical cord, placenta-which are deemed to be impure [START_REF] Jeffery | Traditional Birth Attendants in Rural North India: The Social Organization of Childbearing[END_REF]. However, such a statement that the dai's functions during childbirth are limited to the practice of dirty work needs to be revisited. As [START_REF] Pinto | More Than a Dai: Birth, Work and Rural Dalit Women's Perspectives[END_REF] suggests: 'While all of these acts can be understood through the idiom of "pollution taboo", to think of Dalit women's labour solely in those terms is to undermine its symbolic, physical and social value' . According to the peasant women I have met in South India, the removal of polluting matter was never presented as an essential act of the delivery, nor seen as the major function of the TBAs. I now wish to draw attention to what remains after the training of TBAs. In this last section, training will be examined first as the acquisition of new knowledge and skills whether or not put into practice. Training also needs to be analysed as a form of social capital.

The Traces of TBAs' Training and Their Mode of Reappropriation

My long-term ethnography in Tamil Nadu gave me various opportunities to explore the various aspects of the traces of TBAs' training. My purpose here is to present the TBAs' intimate perceptions and experiences of this training. I propose to examine the contradictions they encountered in implementing the learned practices as well as their modes of reappropriation of these practices. We found that mostly TBA training had limited impact on the functions and practices of the maruttuvacci, who already benefit from a good social status in their community. However, some maruttuvacci were disappointed after the training, as villagers thinking that they were already paid by the government were not willing to pay for their services anymore. This policy had another unintended consequence. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the term maruttuvacci, designating the Hindu TBAs of this region, received a negative connotation after the implementation of the government TBA training. It brought about the distinction between the dai 'trained' in the biomedical framework and the untrained maruttuvacci [START_REF] Van Hollen | Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India[END_REF].

Numerous training programmes concluded with the awarding of a small metal valise to those newly trained TBAs. This valise contained diverse materials and consumable products that were supposed to be appropriate for establishing the new status of the 'trained' women and the application of the good practices that have been learned. However, few of these programmes foresee the implementation of follow-up activities and the renewal of the materials distributed. For example, I met Panchalie, an old village birth attendant in a deserved area surrounding Pondicherry. She said: 'Yes, since the training I always use gloves to make a delivery. But now only one remains as the other was taken by a crow' .

In some cases, the main objective of TBA training implemented in this area in the 2000s was simply to increase the number of delivering women sent to the hospital. TBAs were supposed to recognize obstetrical complications and to encourage and accompany these women to deliver in health institutions. Those complications were said to be easy to identify (bleeding during pregnancy, haemorrhage during or after delivery, fever, headache, oedema of member and face, duration of labour over 12 hours). However, the absence of recognition of obstetrical complications by TBAs was frequently reported by the nurses and midwives I met in village health centres. They understood that the abundance of bleeding was, for example, not interpreted by TBAs and villagers as a retention of the placenta or a uterine rupture, but as the proof of the ejection of impure blood and of the good functioning of nature. Much remains hidden from the view of the evaluators of TBA training.

For some of my informants in Tamil Nadu, placental retention was not seen as a dangerous and unpredictable obstetric anomaly but as a voluntary action effected by the woman who gives birth. It is said in this case that this woman is pisani (stingy). 'She hides her placenta and eats it in secret, without telling it to her stepmother' , says Angelai. This was a commonly shared perception among our informants. The symbolic significance of this retention was seen as an act of rebellion against the hierarchical order established in the marital home. In everyday life the young wife, subject to the authority of her mother-in-law, is required to take her meals in the kitchen, only after having served at table members of her family (Hancart Petitet 2011b). Moreover, other reasons stand behind the non-application of good learned practices. Social and commercial logics also led some TBAs to shape their practices according to the desire of their patients and not according to the biomedical technique they are supposed to implement after the training. Satchadie, a 'trained' TBA in the town of Pondicherry remarked: 'If I do as they do in the hospital, why would the women prefer to give birth with me?'

As rightly remarked by Satchadie in the previous sentence, there is a need to understand why women choose to deliver with her help rather than to go to the hospital. How and why did Satchadie recompose episiotomy, 16 a very well-known obstetrical practice? This practice is the object of numerous controversies within the biomedical environment. In South India, the episiotomy seems widely practised in public or private maternities. At home, as well as in the campaign in urban areas, numerous TBAs also resort to its use in cases of complicated childbirth. Satchadie, trained in the biomedical practice of the episiotomy in a hospital, justified her refusal to apply the learned cutting and suturing practices when performing an episiotomy: 17 'During my training they gave me all the equipment: scissors, thread and a thin needle, but I do not use them. I apply my former method, I make the cut by knocking' . Applied in the last phase of the expulsion when 'the baby is stuck' , the 'cut by knocking' consists in applying a jerking twisting motion with the index and major fingers, joined and tightened on the low and median part of the vulva. The immediate, obtained, and wished effect is a vertical tear of the perineum. This tear will not be sewn up again and will need specific and repeated medical care:

If the baby does not go out it means that the mouth [the vulva] is too small. At the hospital they open it with scissors, but I do it this way, and it will open. Then, when the baby is outside, I wipe the body of the woman. I wet a tissue with brandy and I apply it on the cut. I ask the lady to hold the joined legs and the bandage will stick to it. After the third day, I apply Dettol and I do the bandage once again. But I do not make the suture. Satchadie

As explained by Satchadie, the methods of the repair of the cut are a determining factor in the acceptance of episiotomy by the patients:

People call me at their home because they are afraid of the cut and of the suture at the hospital. If I make it as they do at the hospital, what they will do?

The women cannot bear the pain of the suture. Thus they refuse. Sometimes I tell them, that it will not hurt, that we can do it, but they say no. They want me to apply my method as usual.

This quote illustrates how the learned practices within the biomedical system are reinterpreted and incorporated into the construction of new practices. This issue has been discussed, for example, by [START_REF] Jordan | Cosmopolitical Obstetrics: Some Insights from the Training of Traditional Midwives[END_REF] and [START_REF] Pigg | Authority in Translation: Finding, Knowing, Naming, and Training "Traditional Birth Attendants" in Nepal[END_REF]. They highlight that, contrary to the presuppositions of the biomedical trainers, a learned practice is rarely applied. In our example the gap proceeds at another order. If the argument 'they do not want' makes sense within the problem of the relations of caste, class, and power governing social relationships between Satchadie and the woman giving birth, it also illustrates a form of equal sharing power between Satchadie and the women she assists. It is true that scholars widely highlight the correlation between power and use of technology in the biomedical arena of the birth (Davis-Floyd and Sargent 1997). However, the example of Satchadie shows that within a 'traditional' system the use of technology does not reduce the space of negotiation of care practices.

Contrary to what [START_REF] Stephens | Training Urban Traditional Birth Attendants: Balancing International Policy and Local Reality: Preliminary Evidence from the Slums of India on the Attitudes and Practice of Clients and Practitioners[END_REF] found in Andhra Pradesh, in a survey of urban TBAs who trained in the biomedical field and who got improved status after the training, the status of Satchadie remains unchanged before and after the training. Her status did not improve (which could be the case because of a recognition gained as a health professional or using new equipment). Nor is it devalued (for example, because of a lack of remuneration for home-based acts that users would consider from now as paid by the government). The status of Satchadie is not linked to the rate of remuneration for her care services, nor to her low caste, but to her knowledge and skills guided by her spiritual power acquired as kula deivam [START_REF] Petitet | Transformations contemporaines des pouvoirs, des savoirs et des pratiques de Satchadie, matrone à Pondichéry[END_REF].

According to biomedical instructors, only the knowledge learned during the training is to be integrated and applied by the TBAs. Nevertheless, the ethnography of their practices teaches us that 'trained' TBAs recompose this new knowledge. This knowledge and the apparent advantages that its dispensation involves (an allowance for daily expenses, association with the hospital and its actors) can be at the root of familial, social, and economic emancipation of the TBAs. They favour the invention of new practices. Far from being the major influence in the transformation of the practices of TBAs, the biomedical system training represents only one of several factors determining TBA practices. Some TBAs integrate different components of the act of caring-the context, the choice of medicine used, the earlier practice exercised, the practice learned, or the request of the patient-in order to recompose a practice of caring that is better adapted to a given situation and patient at a given time. These practitioners opt for a legitimization that no longer depends on their rank in the hierarchy of the biomedical system. This legitimization is built according to their capacity to produce and to spread new forms of care, forms of theory and practice borrowed from the register of biomedical knowledge and from the corpus of popular knowledge regarding childbirth. The Emergence of New TBAs?

Jordan observed that during TBA training, biomedicine, which she terms 'cosmopolitan medicine' , presents itself as a form of authoritative knowledge. This training relegates indigenous knowledge to the benches of illegitimacy and does not accord any consideration of the 'traditional' modes of apprenticeship. It favours the acquisition of knowledge through biomedical instructors in a system in which all traditional practices are absent or devalued. Jordan concludes that in spurning indigenous knowledge, 'cosmopolitan' obstetrics becomes 'Cosmo-political' obstetrics, that is, a system that reinforces a particular distribution of power among different social and cultural strata [START_REF] Jordan | Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden and the United States[END_REF]. Nevertheless, the supposed monolithic hegemony of biomedicine on indigenous medical systems has been widely dismantled [START_REF] Harrison | Medicine and Orientalism: Perspectives on Europe's Encounter with Indian Medical Systems[END_REF], and the encounters between Western medicine and traditional childbirth practices are much more complex than a vertical imposition of the values of one system on the other. As far as TBAs are concerned, they are still very active in many places as the biomedical obstetric services are far from covering the needs of the entire Indian population and they mostly reinterpreted and transformed the practices learned during the teaching received in the biomedical system. Public health actors also perceived, reinterpreted, and used the knowledge of TBAs in different ways. Once TBAs were perceived as wicked mothers whose archaic practices must be controlled. Later, TBAs brought together ideal elements of any development activity-locality (with a rural, local character), community, and low costand were also seen as the emblematic ambassadors of traditional knowledge. Then, following the new global strategy to reduce maternal mortality, TBAs have been gradually replaced by ANMs. In early 2000, a large proportion of the population still had no access to maternal healthcare and delivered at home with a TBA [START_REF] Hogan | Maternal Mortality for 181 Countries, 1980-2008: A Systematic Analysis of Progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5[END_REF]. Since 2000, under India's National Population Policy and the Reproductive and Child Health programme (RCH-II) and its commitment to achieving Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG5), various initiatives have been introduced in order to promote and implement institutional birth services. 18 Despite this recent and unprecedented commitment of donors in the field of maternal health in the Southern countries, various questions remain in uncertainty. Given the persistent inequalities in access to healthcare and the interrelated collapse of the market economy, the universal biomedicalization of childbirth may remain limited. We talked to the daughters of Angelai, Palavankodie, Satchadie, and others. None of them was willing to be trained by their mother or take over their tasks and responsibilities. TBA work was seen as 'too difficult' because they have to be available day and night, 'too dirty' , and 'too badly recognized and paid' . Nevertheless, many nonbiomedically trained birth attendants continue to take care of women's childbearing in India and in many other parts of the world [START_REF] Sarker | Reasons for Preference of Home Delivery with Traditional Birth Attendants (Tbas) in Rural Bangladesh: A Qualitative Exploration[END_REF]. In India, many activists are raising their voices [START_REF] Sadgopal | Can Maternity Services Open Up to the Indigenous Traditions of Midwifery?[END_REF]) and acting to continue to promote traditional birth practices in deserved areas. 19 Also, various initiatives offer alternative natural birth options for upper-and middleclass women. 20 Therefore, a careful reading of contemporary reconfigurations of the knowledge and practices mobilized in the field of human reproduction remains relevant: What are the emerging social forms of 'authoritative knowledge' when the 'biomedical things' [START_REF] Hardon | Medical Technologies: Flows, Frictions and New Socialities[END_REF] are not available, or when people do not want to interact with it? Notes 10. AYUSH is the acronym of the medical systems that are being practised in India such as Ayurdeva, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy. 11. Tamil vernacular term: maruttu: local remedies, vacci: woman. The vernacular terms noted in italics are transliterated according to the rules adopted by the Tamil Lexicon (1924-36). 12. Because of lack of knowledge regarding the factors of obstetric complications or because of lack of trust in biomedical service. See, for example, the works of [START_REF] Ram | Medical Management and Giving Birth: Responses of Coastal Women in Tamil Nadu[END_REF]. 13. Paraiyars: Traditionally, peasants and drums players. Arundhathiyars:

Contemporary term used to define the leather worker caste speaking Telugu, also named Sakkili. Vannan: Washerman. Responsible for ceremony of birth, puberty, wedding, and death. The schematic elements are indicative. For a contemporary treatment of the caste system see Deliège (2004). 14. That is to say, the discourse of experts in development activities. 15. See the analysis of [START_REF] Jaffré | La bataille des femmes: Analyse anthropologique de la mortalité maternelle dans quelques services d' obstétrique d'Afrique de l'Ouest[END_REF] related to the structural determinants of maternal mortality in West Africa. 16. The episiotomy is a median cutting of the perineum during the last phase of childbirth to quickly enlarge the opening for the baby to pass through. 17. Generally, the practice of episiotomy is not included in TBA training. 18. See Chapter 1 of this volume.

  19. For example, Jan Swasthya Sahyog in Madhya Pradesh organizes dai training on a regular basis: see http:// www.jssbilaspur.org/ dai-training, accessed 10 March 2021. 20. For example, the Natural Birthing Centre in Kerala, http:// birthvillage.in accessed 10 March 2021.

  OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF -FIRSTPROOFS, Mon Apr 12 2021, NEWGEN /12_first_proofs/files_to_typesetting/validation

Jullien080121_PK_ATIND.indd 112 Jullien080121_PK_ATIND.indd 112 12-Apr-21 16:44:30 12-Apr-21 16:44:30

Jullien080121_PK_ATIND.indd 99 Jullien080121_PK_ATIND.indd 99 12-Apr-21 16:44:29 12-Apr-21 16:44:29

Jullien080121_PK_ATIND.indd 101 Jullien080121_PK_ATIND.indd 101 12-Apr-21 16:44:29 12-Apr-21 16:44:29

Jullien080121_PK_ATIND.indd 107 Jullien080121_PK_ATIND.indd 107 12-Apr-21 16:44:30 12-Apr-21 16:44:30