Construction de la technologie pour l'ecole moyenne en France : Un aperçu historique

Résumé

L'aperçu historique est celui des contenus prescrits, des propositions pour l'enseignement et des successives esquisses de la technologie au collège (11–15 ans). À partir de l'identification des tâches, de leurs visées et de leurs références, il caractérise chacune des cohérences provisoirement fixées par un principe fondateur et identifiée par une méthode. Se succèdent ainsi les méthodes des travaux ménagers, des applications modernes, des éléments logiques, du projet technique, des éléments de la qualité et des scénarios. Bien que la technologie soit toujours définie comme un enseignement général contribuant à l'orientation scolaire, elle oscille entre sciences appliquées, activités manuelles et techniques, initiation scientifique et technique ou découverte des réalités sociotechniques. Par conséquent, cette histoire met en évidence les fondements didactiques de cette discipline scolaire et leurs hésitations. S'opposent en particulier, approche d'investigation et approche de réalisation, références domestiques et industrielles, savoirs élémentaires ou projets techniques. L'étude comparée de ces méthodes révèle également les principes de construction de cette discipline scolaire pour en faire un enseignement élémentaire, progressif et flexible. Cette histoire didactique propose ainsi des moyens pour rendre intelligible la structure des curriculums disciplinaires et pour intervenir sur leur construction.     

Etat présent de l'utilisation des ordinateurs pour l'étude de la littérature française

This article examines only published work directly related to the study of French literature; excluded are automatic translation, production of bibliographies or critical editions, and linguistic studies. Well before the invention of the computer, the importance of close attention to words as a prime aspect of literature had been stressed by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, who thus indirectly justified the several types of computer-aided studies now being done. Of these, word indexes can be useful only if the original work was poetry written in lines of fixed length. Grammatical concordances (which distinguish homographs and gather together inflected forms under one heading) have so far been produced only mechanographically; development of computer processes to produce these research tools is well advanced. The computerized alphabetical concordances, in spite of minor difficulties, are eminently usable. While it is difficult to know to what extent indexes and concordances have been used for the study of French literature, one such study, a traditional approach to Baudelaire, was facilitated and made more accurate through the use of a word index. Other possibilities, for example, the study of the evocative effect of sound patterns in poetry, are opened up by programs that transcribe poetry into phonetic symbols. use of computers has shed valuable light on authorship of anonymous articles in theEncyclopédie and has provided a clearer understanding of the techniques proper to oral literature. Unsuccessful computer-aided studies of French literature seem to fail because of insufficient sophistication in the approach to literature. Thus, it would seem that in the partnership between the literary man and the computer man, the literary man should be the dominant party.     

Generalisations de la transformation de shanks,de la table de Pade et de l'ε-algorithme

This paper deals with a generalization of the Shank's transformation for a sequence of elements of a topological vector space. It is showned how this generalization leads to a generalization of the Padé table. A recursive algorithm for effecting this transformation is given. Its properties are studied and some theorems are proved. This algorithm can be considered as a generalization of the ε-algorithm of Wynn. A second generalization is also studied and a third one which needs less elements of the initial sequence. The paper ends with a discussion on the vector case.      

Sur la confection d'un lexique pour l'analyse automatique

The goodness of the results to be obtained from a system for syntactic analysis of a natural language by computer (with French as an example) depends crucially on the way the lexicon is constructed. To avoid incorrect parses of a correct sentence, verbal selection rules are required. These rules are just the acceptability constraints observed between verb and subject and between verb and object in sentences of the formN ₁ tV N ₂ andN ₁ tV N ₂ P N ₃. It is well known that not every noun subclass is an acceptable subject (or object) for every verb in such sentences; those that are constitute the selection of the verb. By a careful definition of each subclass of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., these rules can be incorporated into Harris' string grammar, which is used here. The definitions should, insofar as possible, be based on formal distributional criteria, so that the classification will be independent of intuitive judgments. The main conclusions are that both the lexicon and the grammar must be very detailed if one wishes to eliminate all incorrect parses; that no automatic word classification is possible, for example, via a dialogue with the computer; and finally, that the computer can be used fruitfully to investigate distributional phenomena in as-yet-unexplored subdomains, for example, by analyzing scientific text.

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Morris Salkoff is on the staff of the Laboratoire d'Automatique Documentaire et de Linguistique (E.R.A. 247 du C.N.R.S.), in Paris.