The Spoken Portuguese: Geographic and Social Varieties project has as its main goal the Portuguese teaching as foreign language. The idea is to provide a collection of authentic spoken texts and to make it friendly usable. Therefore, a selection of spontaneous oral data was made, using either already compiled material or material recorded for this purpose. The final corpus constitution resulted...

BACKGROUND The population of Portugal is aging. The lack of data on older adults' nutritional status and the lack of nutrition knowledge amongst health professionals, caregivers, and older adults themselves, remains a challenge. OBJECTIVE The Nutrition UP 65 study aims to reduce nutritional inequalities in the older Portuguese adult population and improve knowledge regarding older Portuguese ...

The semantic annotation of corpora has an important role to play in ensuring that sentences occurring in natural language texts are correctly understood based on their intended context. Two examples of lexical semantic units that contribute to this knowledge are word senses – which allow words with multiple meanings to be understood based on the context in which they are used – and named entiti...

Until the establishment of the "Commission for the study of and combat against sleeping sickness" (Missão de estudo e combate à doença do sono) in 1945, underfunded and understaffed health services had not been a priority for the colonial administration in Portuguese Guinea. The Commission not only implemented endemic disease control in the territory under the auspices of metropolitan instituti...

Ten adult Brazilian Portuguese speakers were recorded producing the same words in contexts of relatively high and low semantic predictability. Significant vowel reduction in the former context was uncovered in the case of two of the three vowel types examined. The reduction of these vowels, /e/ and /a/, was both spectral and temporal. We describe some subtle parallels and differences between th...

Nogueiro et al. (2015) utilize Y chromosome and mitochondrial genotype data from a contemporary Iberian and non-Iberian human populations to explore the genetic identity of Portuguese “crypto-Jews.” In the first section of the paper, a historical introduction reviews the plight of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula from the earliest archaeological evidence, through the Inquisition, to the current da...

In the last fifteen years, the automatic payment in Portugal has showed periods of very strong growth. In fact, the present Portuguese banking net system has a capacity of more than 90.600 point-of-sale machines, where it is allowed to buy and pay any service in a very comfortable way. Due to the great impact that this service has been getting on the Portuguese population since its appearance i...

This study compares the acoustic properties of Australian English and Brazilian Portuguese vowels as a means of predicting L2 discrimination difficulty. Euclidean Distances between the vowels of the two languages were computed to quantify acoustic similarity and to predict discrimination difficulty for Australian English learners of Brazilian Portuguese. Results show that Euclidean Distances su...

This paper describes work on incorporating Princenton’s WordNet morphosemantics links to the fabric of the Portuguese OpenWordNetPT. Morphosemantic links are relations between verbs and derivationally related nouns that are semantically typed (such as for instance “tune-tuner” — in Portuguese “afinar-afinador” – linked through an agent link). Morphosemantic links have been discussed for Princet...

This paper presents some work on direct and indirect speech in Portuguese using corpus-based methods: we report on a study whose aim was to identify (i) Portuguese verbs used to introduce reported speech and (ii) syntactic patterns used to convey reported speech, in order to enhance the performance of a quotation extraction system, dubbed QUEMDISSE?. In addition, (iii) we present a Portuguese c...