We present an ongoing research project focused on the construction of a Universal Dependencies (UD) corpus of Portuguese epidemiological reports derived from documents published within the Brazilian public health system. We describe findings and challenges to build such a corpus from PDF reports processed through a controlled document extraction pipeline that contrasts layout-aware extraction with raw PDF text extraction, explicitly addressing the impact of tabular content on downstream syntactic analysis. Narrative text is annotated using multiple UD parsers for Portuguese, including widely used and state-of-the-art tools, and their outputs are systematically compared using descriptive structural indicators and targeted qualitative inspection. Our analysis highlights domain-specific challenges in epidemiological texts and shows that document extraction and representation choices have a stronger effect on parsing behavior than parser selection alone. Based on these findings, we identify robust preprocessing configurations and discuss design choices for a UD-epidemiological corpus to support future research on syntactic parsing, domain adaptation, and downstream natural language processing tasks in epidemiology and public health.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for Natural Language Inference (NLI), yet their ability to perform logic-sensitive semantic reasoning, especially outside English, remains underexplored. This paper presents a preliminary investigation into the feasibility and usefulness of developing FraCaS-BR, a Portuguese adaptation of the FraCaS benchmark for semantic inference. Using a small diagnostic subset of seven FraCaS problems focusing on generalized quantifiers, plurals, and nominal anaphora, we evaluate the behavior of three LLMs (ChatGPT, Maritalk, and Evaristo) on Brazilian Portuguese translations. Each problem is submitted multiple times to assess correctness, variance, and consistency relative to the original FraCaS gold labels. The results reveal systematic differences across models.While ChatGPT shows higher overall correctness and stability, all models exhibit limitations that undermine their reliability on logic-controlled inference tasks. The extent of manual correction required during translation further underscores the necessity of human-in-the-loop evaluation. Taken together, these findings support and motivate the development of FraCaS-BR as a controlled evaluation resource for assessing semantic reasoning in Portuguese.

This paper introduces the mwetoolkit-lib, an adaptation of the mwetoolkit as a python library. The original toolkit performs the extraction and identification of multiword expressions (MWEs) in large text bases through the command line. One of the contributions of our work is the adaptation of the MWE extraction pipeline from the mwetoolkit, allowing its usage in python development environments and integration in larger pipelines. The other contribution is the execution of a pilot experiment aiming to show the impact of MWE discovery in data professionals’ work. This experiment found that the addition of MWE knowledge to the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) vectorization altered the word relevance order, improving the linguistic quality of the clusters returned by k-means method.

The vast amount of research introducing new corpora and techniques for semi-automatically annotating corpora shows the important role that datasets play in today’s research, especially in the machine learning community. This rapid development raises concerns about the quality of the datasets created and consequently of the models trained, as recently discussed with respect to the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task. In this work we conduct an annotation experiment based on a small subset of the SICK corpus. The experiment reveals several problems in the annotation guidelines, and various challenges of the NLI task itself. Our quantitative evaluation of the experiment allows us to assign our empirical observations to specific linguistic phenomena and leads us to recommendations for future annotation tasks, for NLI and possibly for other tasks.

This paper describes work on incorporating Princenton’s WordNet morphosemantics links to the fabric of the Portuguese OpenWordNet-PT. Morphosemantic links are relations between verbs and derivationally related nouns that are semantically typed (such as for tune-tuner ― in Portuguese “afinar-afinador” – linked through an “agent” link). Morphosemantic links have been discussed for Princeton’s WordNet for a while, but have not been added to the official database. These links are very useful, they help us to improve our Portuguese WordNet. Thus we discuss the integration of these links in our base and the issues we encountered with the integration.

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.

This paper presents NomLex-PT, a lexical resource describing Portuguese nominalizations. NomLex-PT connects verbs to their nominalizations, thereby enabling NLP systems to observe the potential semantic relationships between the two words when analysing a text. NomLex-PT is freely available and encoded in RDF for easy integration with other resources. Most notably, we have integrated NomLex-PT with OpenWordNet-PT, an open Portuguese Wordnet.