This paper reports on an ongoing task of monolingual word sense alignment in which a comparative study between the Portuguese Academy of Sciences Dictionary and the Dicionário Aberto is carried out in the context of the ELEXIS (European Lexicographic Infrastructure) project. Word sense alignment involves searching for matching senses within dictionary entries of different lexical resources and linking them, which poses significant challenges. The lexicographic criteria are not always entirely consistent within individual dictionaries and even less so across different projects where different options may have been assumed in terms of structure and especially wording techniques of lexicographic glosses. This hinders the task of matching senses. We aim to present our annotation workflow in Portuguese using the Semantic Web technologies. The results obtained are useful for the discussion within the community.

In this article we present an exploratory approach to enrich a WordNet-like lexical ontology with the synonyms present in a standard monolingual Portuguese dictionary. The dictionary was converted from PDF into XML and senses were automatically identified and annotated. This allowed us to extract them, independently of definitions, and to create sets of synonyms (synsets). These synsets were then aligned with WordNet synsets, both in the same language (Portuguese) and projecting the Portuguese terms into English, Spanish and Galician. This process allowed both the addition of new term variants to existing synsets, as to create new synsets for Portuguese.

Semantic relations between words are key to building systems that aim to understand and manipulate language. For English, the “de facto” standard for representing this kind of knowledge is Princeton’s WordNet. Here, we describe the wordnet-like resources currently available for Portuguese: their origins, methods of creation, sizes, and usage restrictions. We start tackling the problem of comparing them, but only in quantitative terms. Finally, we sketch ideas for potential collaboration between some of the projects that produce Portuguese wordnets.

How do people behave in their everyday information seeking tasks, which often involve Wikipedia? Are there systems which can help them, or do a similar job? In this paper we describe Págico, an evaluation contest with the main purpose of fostering research in these topics. We describe its motivation, the collection of documents created, the evaluation setup, the topics chosen and their choice, the participation, as well as the measures used for evaluation and the gathered resources. The task―between information retrieval and question answering―can be further described as answering questions related to Portuguese-speaking culture in the Portuguese Wikipedia, in a number of different themes and geographic and temporal angles. This initiative allowed us to create interesting datasets and perform some assessment of Wikipedia, while also improving a public-domain open-source system for further wikipedia-based evaluations. In the paper, we provide examples of questions, we report the results obtained by the participants, and provide some discussion on complex issues.

Synonyms dictionaries are useful resources for natural language processing. Unfortunately their availability in digital format is limited, as publishing companies do not release their dictionaries in open digital formats. Dicionário-Aberto (Simões and Farinha, 2010) is an open and free digital synonyms dictionary for the Portuguese language. It is under public domain and in textual digital format, which makes it usable for any task. Synonyms dictionaries are commonly used for the extraction of relations between words, the construction of complex structures like ontologies or thesaurus (comparable to WordNet (Miller et al., 1990)), or just the extraction of lists of words of specific type. This article will present Dicionário-Aberto, discussing how it was created, its main characteristics, the type of information present on it and the formats in which it is available. Follows the description of an API designed specifically to help Dicionário-Aberto processing without the need to tackle with the dictionary format. Finally, we will analyze the results on some data extraction experiments, extracting lists of words from a specific class, and extracting relationships between words.

Languages are born, evolve and, eventually, die. During this evolution their spelling rules (and sometimes the syntactic and semantic ones) change, putting old documents out of use. In Portugal, a pair of political agreements with Brazil forced relevant changes on the way the Portuguese language is written. In this article we will detail these two Orthographic Agreements (one in the thirties and the other more recently, in the nineties), and the challenges present on the automatic migration of old documents spelling to their actual one. We will reveal Bigorna, a toolkit for the classification of language variants, their comparison and the conversion of texts in different language versions. These tools will be explained together with examples of migration issues. As Birgorna relies on a set of conversion rules we will also discuss how to infer conversion rules from a set of documents (texts with different ages). The document concludes with a brief evaluation on the conversion and classification tool results and their relevance in the current Portuguese language scenario.

In this paper we describe some studies of Portuguese-English word alignment, focusing on (i) measuring the importance of the coupling between dictionaries and corpus; (ii) assessing the relevance of using syntactic information (POS and lemma) or just word forms, and (iii) taking into account the direction of translation. We first provide some motivation for the studies, as well as insist in separating type from token anlignment. We then briefly describe the resources employed: the EuroParl and COMPARA corpora, and the alignment tools, NATools, introducing some measures to evaluate the two kinds of dictionaries obtained. We then present the results of several experiments, comparing sizes, overlap, translation fertility and alignment density of the several bilingual resources built. We also describe preliminary data as far as quality of the resulting dictionaries or alignment results is concerned.

In this article we present T2O - a workbench to assist the process of translating heterogeneous resources into ontologies, to enrich and add multilingual information, to help programming with them, and to support ontology publishing. T2O is an ontology algebra.