We describe a knowledge and resource light system for an automatic morphological analysis and tagging of Brazilian Portuguese.1 We avoid the use of labor intensive resources; particularly, large annotated corpora and lexicons. Instead, we use (i) an annotated corpus of Peninsular Spanish, a language related to Portuguese, (ii) an unannotated corpus of Portuguese, (iii) a description of Portugue...

All organizations target a leading position in the market they operate in. To attain this leading position, it is essential to correctly balance the associates’ rational and emotional competences. Hence the pertinence of instruments which allow the measurement of the associates’ level of emotional competences. This paper describes the process that this specific method adopted in the cross-cultu...

This paper presents a study about the role of grammar in on-line interactions conducted in Portuguese and in English, between Brazilian and English-speaking interactants, with the aim of teaching Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL). The interactions occurred by means of chat and the MSN Messenger, and generated audio and video data for language analysis. Grammar is dealt with from two perspe...

Despite the growing interest in NLP focused on the Brazilian Portuguese language in recent years, its obvious counterpart – Natural Language Generation (NLG) – remains in that case a little-explored research field. In this paper we describe preliminary results of a first project of this kind, addressing the issue of surface realization for Brazilian Portuguese. Our approach, which may be partic...

The amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a degenerative neurological disorder that has a great impact in the quality of life of the patients. This study had the objective of validating the ALS Assessment Questionnaire in the Portuguese Language (ALSAQ-40/BR). The version of ALSAQ-40/BR, was adapted into the Portuguese language after the evaluation and re-evaluation of 20 patients with a defin...

We investigated English-learning 4-month-olds’ ability to discriminate a final rise versus fall in pitch that distinguishes questions from statements in Portuguese and English. Using visual habituation, we showed that English-learning 4-month-olds failed to categorize segmentally varied Portuguese statements vs. questions. They only succeeded when tested with restricted segmental variability in...

In this paper we present a free, open source platform, that translates in real time (written) European Portuguese into Portuguese Sign Language, being the signs produced by an avatar. We discuss basic needs of such a system in terms of Natural Language Processing and Animation Synthesis, and propose an architecture for it. Moreover, we have selected a set of existing tools that couple with our ...

INTRODUCTION The cross-cultural adaptation of the Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment is important so it can be used with confidence in Portuguese language. OBJECTIVE To perform a cross-cultural adaptation of the Portuguese version of the Patient-Generated Subjective Global Assessment and to estimate its intrarater reliability. MATERIAL AND METHODS This is a validation study. Fac...

BACKGROUND No previous study has examined the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors and explored the influence of immigration status and acculturation on overweight/obesity among the Portuguese immigrants to Luxembourg. Our objectives were to (1) compare the prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors between native Luxembourgers and Portuguese immigrants, (2) examine the relationship between...

In this paper we report the work done by Linguateca in order to add Portuguese to two tracks of CLEF, namely the adhoc IR task and the QA task. We start by a brief description of Linguateca's aims and the way we see CLEF from the standpoint of Portuguese language processing; we then document several interesting problems posed by the tasks we added to organize, and offer some suggestions for imp...