Marcelo Viridiano


2026

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a major public health issue, with the World Health Organization estimating that one in three women experiences physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner during her lifetime. In Brazil, although healthcare professionals are legally required to report such cases, underreporting remains significant due to difficulties in identifying abuse and limited integration between public information systems. This study investigates whether FrameNet-based semantic annotation of open-text fields in electronic medical records can support the identification of patterns of GBV. We compare the performance of an SVM classifier for GBV cases trained on (1) frame-annotated text, (2) annotated text combined with parameterized data, and (3) parameterized data alone. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that models incorporating semantic annotation outperform categorical models, achieving over 0.3 improvement in F1 score and demonstrating that domain-specific semantic representations provide meaningful signals beyond structured demographic data. The findings support the hypothesis that semantic analysis of clinical narratives can enhance early identification strategies and support more informed public health interventions.

2025

This paper presents a multimodal semantic analysis of accessible Brazilian short films using a frame-based annotation approach. We introduce a subset of the Audition dataset, comprising six short films from the animation and documentary genres. We analysed three communicative modes: original audio, audio description, and visual content. Trained annotators semantically annotated each mode following the FrameNet Brazil multimodal methodology. To compare meaning across modalities, we used cosine similarity over frame-semantic representations. Results show that audio description aligns more closely with video content than original audio, reflecting its role in translating visual meaning into language. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of frame semantics in modelling meaning across modalities and provide quantitative evidence of audio description as a bridge between visual and verbal communication. The dataset and annotation strategies are a valuable resource for research on multimodal representation, semantic similarity, and accessible media.
Large Language Models (LLMs) reproduce and exacerbate the social biases present in their training data, and resources to quantify this issue are limited. While research has attempted to identify and mitigate such biases, most efforts have been concentrated around English, lagging the rapid advancement of LLMs in multilingual settings. In this paper, we introduce a new multilingual parallel dataset SHADES to help address this issue, designed for examining culturally-specific stereotypes that may be learned by LLMs. The dataset includes stereotypes from 20 regions around the world and 16 languages, spanning multiple identity categories subject to discrimination worldwide. We demonstrate its utility in a series of exploratory evaluations for both “base” and “instruction-tuned” language models. Our results suggest that stereotypes are consistently reflected across models and languages, with some languages and models indicating much stronger stereotype biases than others.

2024

This paper presents Framed Multi30K (FM30K), a novel frame-based Brazilian Portuguese multimodal-multilingual dataset which i) extends the Multi30K dataset (Elliot et al., 2016) with 158,915 original Brazilian Portuguese descriptions, and 30,104 Brazilian Portuguese translations from original English descriptions; and ii) adds 2,677,613 frame evocation labels to the 158,915 English descriptions and to the ones created for Brazilian Portuguese; (iii) extends the Flickr30k Entities dataset (Plummer et al., 2015) with 190,608 frames and Frame Elements correlations with the existing phrase-to-region correlations.

2022

This paper presents Charon, a web tool for annotating multimodal corpora with FrameNet categories. Annotation can be made for corpora containing both static images and video sequences paired – or not – with text sequences. The pipeline features, besides the annotation interface, corpus import and pre-processing tools.
This paper presents Lutma, a collaborative, semi-constrained, tutorial-based tool for contributing frames and lexical units to the Global FrameNet initiative. The tool parameterizes the process of frame creation, avoiding consistency violations and promoting the integration of frames contributed by the community with existing frames. Lutma is structured in a wizard-like fashion so as to provide users with text and video tutorials relevant for each step in the frame creation process. We argue that this tool will allow for a sensible expansion of FrameNet coverage in terms of both languages and cultural perspectives encoded by them, positioning frames as a viable alternative for representing perspective in language models.
This paper argues in favor of the adoption of annotation practices for multimodal datasets that recognize and represent the inherently perspectivized nature of multimodal communication. To support our claim, we present a set of annotation experiments in which FrameNet annotation is applied to the Multi30k and the Flickr 30k Entities datasets. We assess the cosine similarity between the semantic representations derived from the annotation of both pictures and captions for frames. Our findings indicate that: (i) frame semantic similarity between captions of the same picture produced in different languages is sensitive to whether the caption is a translation of another caption or not, and (ii) picture annotation for semantic frames is sensitive to whether the image is annotated in presence of a caption or not.

2020

Multimodal aspects of human communication are key in several applications of Natural Language Processing, such as Machine Translation and Natural Language Generation. Despite recent advances in integrating multimodality into Computational Linguistics, the merge between NLP and Computer Vision techniques is still timid, especially when it comes to providing fine-grained accounts for meaning construction. This paper reports on research aiming to determine appropriate methodology and develop a computational tool to annotate multimodal corpora according to a principled structured semantic representation of events, relations and entities: FrameNet. Taking a Brazilian television travel show as corpus, a pilot study was conducted to annotate the frames that are evoked by the audio and the ones that are evoked by visual elements. We also implemented a Multimodal Annotation tool which allows annotators to choose frames and locate frame elements both in the text and in the images, while keeping track of the time span in which those elements are active in each modality. Results suggest that adding a multimodal domain to the linguistic layer of annotation and analysis contributes both to enrich the kind of information that can be tagged in a corpus, and to enhance FrameNet as a model of linguistic cognition.
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