Brassens' poetry still resists algorithms

It's Brassens against robots.

The project proposed by Fig Data consisted in submitting the texts of the famous Sète poet to a hyper-powerful algorithm… Georges Brassens, as an assumed provocateur, would probably have tasted bravado!

To try to achieve this, Fig Data relied on artificial intelligence (AI), BERT: one of the most powerful language models, which revolutionized the field of linguistic analysis 3 years ago.

Its French variations have the name of other monuments of the national heritage:

or even

.

Click on a set for more details

GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF THEMATIC UNITS INTERPRETED BY OUR MODEL.

The idea is simple: the model, over-trained to analyze the French language, is subtly configured for this exercise, then "fed" with all the texts written or taken up in song by Brassens during his career, ie close to of 240 texts.

After a few minutes of analysis,

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