Sónia Reis

Also published as: Sonia Reis


2026

This paper analyzes the semantic parsing of relative clauses in Portuguese in two meaning representation frameworks: Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) and Lexicalized Meaning Representation (LMR). While both treat relatives as noun modifiers, AMR fails to distinguish restrictive from appositive clauses–an important traditional grammatical distinction. We argue for explicitly encoding this difference. The study draws on annotated translations of *The Little Prince* (Saint-Exupéry, 1943) in Brazilian and European Portuguese, highlighting issues in the Brazilian AMR annotations.

2024

This paper presents an adaptation of the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) framework for European Portuguese. This adaptation, referred to as Lexicalized Meaning Representation (LMR), was deemed necessary to address specific challenges posed by the grammar of the language, as well as various linguistic issues raised by the current version of AMR annotation guidelines. Some of these aspects stemmed from the use of a notation similar to AMR to represent real texts from the legal domain, enabling its use in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. In this context, several aspects of AMR were significantly simplified (e.g., the representation of multi-word expressions, named entities, and temporal expressions), while others were introduced, with efforts made to maintain the representation scheme as compatible as possible with standard AMR notation.

2022

This paper analyses the support (or light) verb constructions (SVC) in a publicly available, manually annotated corpus of multiword expressions (MWE) in Brazilian Portuguese. The paper highlights several issues in the linguistic definitions therein adopted for these types of MWE, and reports the results from applying STRING, a rule-based parsing system, originally developed for European Portuguese, to this corpus from Brazilian Portuguese. The goal is two-fold: to improve the linguistic definition of SVC in the annotation task, as well as to gauge the major difficulties found when transposing linguistic resources between these two varieties of the same language.

2021

2017