Gilles Adda, Ioana Vasilescu, François Yvon &ndash; Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN, Paris, France
Language Report French
This chapter presents a survey of the current state of technologies for the automatic processing of the French language. It is based on a thorough analysis of existing tools and resources for French, and also provides an accurate presentation of the domain and its main stakeholders (Adda et al. 2022). The chapter documents the presence of French on the internet and describes in broad terms the existing technologies for the French language. It also spells out general conclusions and formulates recommendations for progress towards deep language understanding for French.
The CommonCrawl project aggregates Web data that is orders of magnitude larger than these resources; and it is updated on a regular basis. Using French subsets of CommonCrawl, it has been possible to train large language models (LMs): FlauBERT uses a corpus of 12B running words, while CamemBERT uses the 22B words OSCAR. Other large LMs for French are available for research and commercial use; they help to boost the state-of-the-art for multiple NLP tasks.