Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language 9th International Conference, PROPOR 2010, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, April 27-30, 2010. Proceedings

The International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese—PROPOR —is the main event in the area of natural language processing that is focused on Portuguese and the theoretical and technological issues related to this language. It w- comes contributions for both written and spoken language processing. The event is hosted in Brazil and in Portugal. The meetings have been held in Lisbon/Portugal (1993), Curitiba/Brazil (1996), Porto Alegre/Brazil (1998), Évora/ Portugal (1999), Atibaia/Brazil (2000), Faro/Portugal (2003), Itatiaia/Brazil (2006) and Aveiro/Portugal (2008). This meeting has been a highly productive forum for the progress of this area and to foster the cooperation among the researchers working on the automated processing of the Portuguese language. PROPOR brings together research groups, promoting the development of methodologies, resources and projects that can be shared among all researchers and practitioners in the field. The ninth edition of this event was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). It had two main tracks: one for language processing and another one for speech processing. This event hosted a special Demonstration Session and the first edition of the PhD and MSc Dissertation Contest, which aimed at recognizing the best academic work on processing of the Portuguese language in the last few years. This edition of the event featured tutorials on statistical machine translation and on speech recognition, as well as invited talks by renowned researchers of natural language processing.

Applications: Information Handling.- Improving IdSay: A Characterization of Strengths and Weaknesses in Question Answering Systems for Portuguese.- Assessing the Impact of Stemming Accuracy on Information Retrieval.- Exploiting Multilingual Grammars and Machine Learning Techniques to Build an Event Extraction System for Portuguese.- Formalizing CST-Based Content Selection Operations.- Applications: Text Processing.- Translating from Complex to Simplified Sentences.- Challenging Choices for Text Simplification.- Comparing Sentence-Level Features for Authorship Analysis in Portuguese.- Language Processing.- A Machine Learning Approach to Portuguese Clause Identification.- A Hybrid Approach for Multiword Expression Identification.- Out-of-the-Box Robust Parsing of Portuguese.- LXGram: A Deep Linguistic Processing Grammar for Portuguese.- Language Resources.- InferenceNet.Br: Expression of Inferentialist Semantic Content of the Portuguese Language.- Comparing Verb Synonym Resources for Portuguese.- Auxiliary Verbs and Verbal Chains in European Portuguese.- P-AWL: Academic Word List for Portuguese.- Speech Recognition.- Automatic Phone Clustering Based on Confusion Matrices.- An Open-Source Speech Recognizer for Brazilian Portuguese with a Windows Programming Interface.- A Baseline System for Continuous Speech Recognition of Brazilian Portuguese Using the West Point Brazilian Portuguese Speech Corpus.- Speech Synthesis.- Voice Quality of European Portuguese Emotional Speech.- Prosodic Prediction in Brazilian Portuguese: A Contribution to Speech Synthesis.- The Role of Morphology in Generating High-Quality Pronunciation Lexica for Regional Variants of Portuguese.