Identifying similar and related words is not only key in natural language understanding but also a suitable task for assessing the quality of computational resources that organise words and meanings of a language, compiled by different means. This paper, which aims to be a reference for those interested in computing word similarity in Portuguese, presents several approaches for this task and is...

We report three experiments exploring the occurrence of perceptuallyguided changes in speech production by a speaker well past the critical period for language acquisition. A first experiment shows that listeners sharing our speaker’s native language (Brazilian Portuguese) can distinguish her productions in that language as having been produced either after recent experience in Brazil or after ...

Speech language therapies in a bilingual dialogical clinic conceive language as interaction and part of each inidividual’s history, enabling deaf people to access Brazilian sign language and the Portuguese language. Purpose: this study aims to discuss the use of Brazilian sign language as the first language for a deaf individual going to a bilingual dialogic clinic from dialogic activities. Met...

The growing use of computer technologies as well as the amount of available information has posed new challenges to humanmachine interaction. Applying natural language processing techniques to information systems has brought advantages to this emerging field. Question-answering (QA) systems have been developed in order to ease the information access process. However, most of today’s QA systems ...

This paper presents a system for real-time, open-domain question answering on the Web of documents written in Portuguese, prepared to handle factual questions and available as a freely accessible online service. In order to deliver candidate answers to input questions phrased in Portuguese, this system resorts to a number of shallow processing tools and question answering techniques that are sp...

This paper shows experimental results concerning automatic enrichment of the speech recognition output with punctuation marks and capitalization information. The two tasks are treated as two classification problems, using a maximum entropy modeling approach. The approach is language independent as reinforced by experiments performed on Portuguese and Spanish Broadcast News corpora. The discrimi...

The generation of natural language from Resource Description Framework (RDF) data has recently gained significant attention due to the continuous growth of Linked Data. A number of these approaches generate natural language in languages other than English, however, no work has been proposed to generate Brazilian Portuguese texts out of RDF. We address this research gap by presenting RDF2PT, an ...

This paper reports the performance of identification of Indonesian speech within a ten-language corpus: English, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, and Swedish. The tasks are performed by implementing Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) on MelFrequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). Two types of experiments that have been undertaken: pair-wise and tenlanguage...

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVES Despite numerous spirituality and/or religiosity (S/R) measurement tools for use in research worldwide, there is little information on S/R instruments in the Portuguese language. The aim of the present study was to map out the S/R scales available for research in the Portuguese language. DESIGN AND SETTING Systematic review of studies found in databases. METHODS A sys...

OBJECTIVE To validate a Portuguese-language version of the COPD assessment test (CAT) for use in Brazil and to assess the reproducibility of this version. METHODS This was multicenter study involving patients with stable COPD at two teaching hospitals in the city of Fortaleza, Brazil. Two independent observers (twice in one day) administered the Portuguese-language version of the CAT to 50 pa...