Adult Learning (AL) programmes need short, trustworthy texts that match learners’ reading abilities, but educators rarely have time, tools, or evidence-based guidelines to select and adapt materials consistently.We present a live demo of iRead4Skills for European Portuguese: a web-based system that (i) estimates readability/complexity for AL-oriented levels aligned with CEFR, (ii) highlights where complexity concentrates (lexical, grammatical, semantic), and (iii) supports rewriting by offering actionable, level-aware suggestions and curated lexical resources.The demo emphasises transparency and “trainer-first” workflows: users see *why* a text is complex and *how* to revise it without losing meaning.

This demo showcases a web-based interface that provides open, interactive access to a large-scale grammatical database of European Portuguese verbal constructions. Through a unified search and exploration environment, users can query, inspect, and compare more than 7,000 distributionally free verbal constructions and over 2,700 verbal idioms (frozen constructions), grounded in long-standing Lexicon–Grammar descriptions. For each construction, the interface exposes core linguistic properties such as argument structure, distributional constraints, semantic roles, major syntactic transformations, and curated usage examples with English translations. The demo illustrates how detailed, manually validated grammatical knowledge can be explored dynamically via the web, supporting linguistic research, language teaching, and NLP development. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest publicly accessible, web-based grammatical resource dedicated to European Portuguese verbal constructions.

Orthographic neighbors (ONs) play a central role in models of visual word recognition and have been shown to influence reading speed, lexical access, and literacy development. Despite their importance, resources providing detailed and flexible ON information remain scarce for European Portuguese. This paper introduces Portho, a corpus-based lexical resource that provides multiple ON metrics for over 43,000 word forms, using several ON definitions. In addition to classical neighborhood size measures, Portho provides frequency-based statistics and graded orthographic distance (OD) features. We analyze the statistical properties of the resource and evaluate its empirical utility in automatic text complexity assessment using the iRead4Skills corpus. Results show that while ON features alone are insufficient to predict readability, they contribute complementary information and compare favorably with existing resources for Portuguese. Portho is made publicly available in different formats to support research in psycholinguistics, readability modeling, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Portuguese.

This paper presents the construction of VIDiom-PT, a corpus in European Portuguese annotated for verbal idioms (e.g. O Rui bateu a bota, lit.: Rui hit the boot ‘Rui died’). This linguistic resource aims to support the development of systems capable of processing such constructions in this language variety. To assist in the annotation effort, two tools were built. The first allows for the detection of possible instances of verbal idioms in texts, while the second provides a graphical interface for annotating them. This effort culminated in the annotation of a total of 5,178 instances of 747 different verbal idioms in more than 200,000 sentences in European Portuguese. A highly reliable inter-annotator agreement was achieved, using Krippendorff’s alpha for nominal data (0.869) with 5% of the data independently annotated by 3 experts. Part of the annotated corpus is also made publicly available.

We present the iRead4Skills Intelligent Complexity Analyzer, an open-access platform specifically designed to assist educators and content developers in addressing the needs of low-literacy adults by analyzing and diagnosing text complexity. This multilingual system integrates a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) components to assess input texts along multiple levels of granularity and linguistic dimensions in Portuguese, Spanish, and French. It assigns four tailored difficulty levels using state-of-the-art models, and introduces four diagnostic yardsticks—textual structure, lexicon, syntax, and semantics—offering users actionable feedback on specific dimensions of textual complexity. Each component of the system is supported by experiments comparing alternative models on manually annotated data.

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.

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.

This paper describes metaTED ― a freely available corpus of metadiscursive acts in spoken language collected via crowdsourcing. Metadiscursive acts were annotated on a set of 180 randomly chosen TED talks in English, spanning over different speakers and topics. The taxonomy used for annotation is composed of 16 categories, adapted from Adel(2010). This adaptation takes into account both the material to annotate and the setting in which the annotation task is performed. The crowdsourcing setup is described, including considerations regarding training and quality control. The collected data is evaluated in terms of quantity of occurrences, inter-annotator agreement, and annotation related measures (such as average time on task and self-reported confidence). Results show different levels of agreement among metadiscourse acts (α ∈ [0.15; 0.49]). To further assess the collected material, a subset of the annotations was submitted to expert appreciation, who validated which of the marked occurrences truly correspond to instances of the metadiscursive act at hand. Similarly to what happened with the crowd, experts revealed different levels of agreement between categories (α ∈ [0.18; 0.72]). The paper concludes with a discussion on the applicability of metaTED with respect to each of the 16 categories of metadiscourse.

This paper presents a linguistic revision process of a speech corpus of Portuguese broadcast news focusing on metadata annotation for rich transcription, and reports on the impact of the new data on the performance for several modules. The main focus of the revision process consisted on annotating and revising structural metadata events, such as disfluencies and punctuation marks. The resultant revised data is now being extensively used, and was of extreme importance for improving the performance of several modules, especially the punctuation and capitalization modules, but also the speech recognition system, and all the subsequent modules. The resultant data has also been recently used in disfluency studies across domains.

The work described in this paper aims to enrich the noun classifications of an existing database of lexical resources (de Matos and Ribeiro, 2004) adding missing information such as semantic relations. Relations are extracted from an annotated and manually corrected corpus. Semantic relations added to the database are retrieved from noun-appositive relations found in the corpus. The method uses clustering to generate labeled sets of words with hypernym relations between set label and set elements.

This paper describes our contribution to let end users configure mixed-initiative spoken dialogue systems to suit their personalized goals. The main problem that we want to address is the reconfiguration of spoken language dialogue systems to deal with generic plug and play artifacts. Such reconfiguration can be seen as a portability problem and is a critical research issue. In order to solve this problem we describe a hybrid approach to design ubiquitous domain models that allows the dialogue system to perform recognition of available tasks on the fly. Our approach considers two kinds of domain knowledge: the global knowledge and the local knowledge. The global knowledge, that is modeled using a top-down approach, is associated at design time with the dialogue system itself. The local knowledge, that is modeled using a bottom-up approach, is defined with each one of the artifacts. When an artifact is activated or deactivated, a bilateral process, supported by a broker, updates the domain knowledge considering the artifact local knowledge. We assume that everyday artifacts are augmented with computational capabilities and semantic descriptions supported by their own knowledge model. A case study focusing a microwave oven is depicted.