Izabela Müller

Also published as: Izabela Muller


2024

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Hurdles in Parsing Multi-word Adverbs: Examples from Portuguese
Izabela Muller | Nuno Mamede | Jorge Baptista
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese - Vol. 1

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The Role of Adverbs in Language Variety Identification: The Case of Portuguese Multi-Word Adverbs
Izabela Müller | Nuno Mamede | Jorge Baptista
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (VarDial 2024)

This paper aims to assess the role of multiword compound adverbs in distinguishing Brazilian Portuguese (PT-BR) from European Portuguese (PT-PT). Two key factors underpin this focus: Firstly, multiword expressions often provide less ambiguity compared to single words, even when their meaning is idiomatic (non-compositional). Secondly, despite constituting a significant portion of lexicons in many languages, they are frequently overlooked in Natural Language Processing, possibly due to their heterogeneous nature and lexical range.For this study, a large lexicon of Portuguese multiword adverbs (3,665) annotated with diatopic information regarding language variety was utilized. The paper investigates the distribution of this category in a corpus consisting in excerpts from journalistic texts sourced from the DSL (Dialect and Similar Language) corpus, representing Brazilian (PT-BR) and European Portuguese (PT-PT), respectively, each partition containing 18,000 sentences.Results indicate a substantial similarity between the two varieties, with a considerable overlap in the lexicon of multiword adverbs. Additionally, specific adverbs unique to each language variety were identified. Lexical entries recognized in the corpus represent 18.2% (PT-BR) to 19.5% (PT-PT) of the lexicon, and approximately 5,700 matches in each partition. While many of the matches are spurious due to ambiguity with otherwise non-idiomatic, free strings, occurrences of adverbs marked as exclusive to one variety in texts from the other variety are rare.