We introduce BERTweetFR, the first large-scale pre-trained language model for French tweets. Our model is initialised using a general-domain French language model CamemBERT which follows the base architecture of BERT. Experiments show that BERTweetFR
outperforms all previous general-domain French language models on two downstream Twitter NLP tasks of offensiveness identification and named entity recognition. The dataset used in the offensiveness detection task is first created and annotated by our team, filling in the gap of such analytic datasets in French. We make our model publicly available in the transformers library with the aim of promoting future research in analytic tasks for French tweets.
Sifting French Tweets to Investigate the Impact of Covid-19 in Triggering Intense Anxiety. Social media can be leveraged to understand public sentiment and feelings in real-time, and target public health messages based on user interests and emotions.
In this paper, we investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in triggering intense anxiety, relying on messages exchanged on Twitter. More specifically, we provide : i) a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of tweets in French related to coronavirus, and ii) a pipeline approach (a filtering mechanism followed by Neural Network methods) to satisfactory classify messages expressing intense anxiety on social media, considering the role played by emotions.
