The objective of the present paper is twofold, to present the MWN.PT WordNet and to report on its construction and on the lessons learned with it. The MWN.PT WordNet for Portuguese includes 41,000 concepts, expressed by 38,000 lexical units. Its synsets were manually validated and are linked to semantically equivalent synsets of the Princeton WordNet of English, and thus transitively to the many wordnets for other languages that are also linked to this English wordnet. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest high quality, manually validated and cross-lingually integrated, wordnet of Portuguese distributed for reuse. Its construction was initiated more than one decade ago and its description is published for the first time in the present paper. It follows a three step <projection, validation with alignment, completion> methodology consisting on the manual validation and expansion of the outcome of an automatic projection procedure of synsets and their hypernym relations, followed by another automatic procedure that transferred the relations of remaining semantic types across wordnets of different languages.

In this paper, we address the problem of Machine Translation (MT) for a specialised domain in a language pair for which only a very small domain-specific parallel corpus is available. We conduct a series of experiments using a purely phrase-based SMT (PBSMT) system and a hybrid MT system (TectoMT), testing three different strategies to overcome the problem of the small amount of in-domain training data. Our results show that adding a small size in-domain bilingual terminology to the small in-domain training corpus leads to the best improvements of a hybrid MT system, while the PBSMT system achieves the best results by adding a combination of in-domain bilingual terminology and a larger out-of-domain corpus. We focus on qualitative human evaluation of the output of two best systems (one for each approach) and perform a systematic in-depth error analysis which revealed advantages of the hybrid MT system over the pure PBSMT system for this specific task.

This paper presents a new linguistic resource for the study and computational processing of Portuguese. CINTIL DependencyBank PREMIUM is a corpus of Portuguese news text, accurately manually annotated with a wide range of linguistic information (morpho-syntax, named-entities, syntactic function and semantic roles), making it an invaluable resource specially for the development and evaluation of data-driven natural language processing tools. The corpus is under active development, reaching 4,000 sentences in its current version. The paper also reports on the training and evaluation of a dependency parser over this corpus. CINTIL DependencyBank PREMIUM is freely-available for research purposes through META-SHARE.

The usual concern when opting for a rule-based or a hybrid machine translation (MT) system is how much effort is required to adapt the system to a different language pair or a new domain. In this paper, we describe a way of adapting an existing hybrid MT system to a new language pair, and show that such a system can outperform a standard phrase-based statistical machine translation system with an average of 10 persons/month of work. This is specifically important in the case of domain-specific MT for which there is not enough parallel data for training a statistical machine translation system.