Hadi Abdine


2022

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Political Communities on Twitter: Case Study of the 2022 French Presidential Election
Hadi Abdine | Yanzhu Guo | Virgile Rennard | Michalis Vazirgiannis
Proceedings of the LREC 2022 workshop on Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences

With the significant increase in users on social media platforms, a new means of political campaigning has appeared. Twitter and Facebook are now notable campaigning tools during elections. Indeed, the candidates and their parties now take to the internet to interact and spread their ideas. In this paper, we aim to identify political communities formed on Twitter during the 2022 French presidential election and analyze each respective community. We create a large-scale Twitter dataset containing 1.2 million users and 62.6 million tweets that mention keywords relevant to the election. We perform community detection on a retweet graph of users and propose an in-depth analysis of the stance of each community. Finally, we attempt to detect offensive tweets and automatic bots, comparing across communities in order to gain insight into each candidate’s supporter demographics and online campaign strategy.

2021

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JuriBERT: A Masked-Language Model Adaptation for French Legal Text
Stella Douka | Hadi Abdine | Michalis Vazirgiannis | Rajaa El Hamdani | David Restrepo Amariles
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2021

Language models have proven to be very useful when adapted to specific domains. Nonetheless, little research has been done on the adaptation of domain-specific BERT models in the French language. In this paper, we focus on creating a language model adapted to French legal text with the goal of helping law professionals. We conclude that some specific tasks do not benefit from generic language models pre-trained on large amounts of data. We explore the use of smaller architectures in domain-specific sub-languages and their benefits for French legal text. We prove that domain-specific pre-trained models can perform better than their equivalent generalised ones in the legal domain. Finally, we release JuriBERT, a new set of BERT models adapted to the French legal domain.