In this paper, we introduce TimeBankPT, a TimeML annotated corpus of Portuguese. It has been produced by adapting an existing resource for English, namely the data used in the first TempEval challenge. TimeBankPT is the first corpus of Portuguese with rich temporal annotations (i.e. it includes annotations not only of temporal expressions but also about events and temporal relations). In addition, it was subjected to an automated error mining procedure that checks the consistency of the annotated temporal relations based on their logical properties. This procedure allowed for the detection of some errors in the annotations, that also affect the original English corpus. The Portuguese language is currently undergoing a spelling reform, and several countries where Portuguese is official are in a transitional period where old and new orthographies are valid. TimeBankPT adopts the recent spelling reform. This decision is to preserve its future usefulness. TimeBankPT is freely available for download.

Corpora of sentences annotated with grammatical information have been deployed by extending the basic lexical and morphological data with increasingly complex information, such as phrase constituency, syntactic functions, semantic roles, etc. As these corpora grow in size and the linguistic information to be encoded reaches higher levels of sophistication, the utilization of annotation tools and, above all, supporting computational grammars appear no longer as a matter of convenience but of necessity. In this paper, we report on the design features, the development conditions and the methodological options of a deep linguistic databank, the CINTIL DeepGramBank. In this corpus, sentences are annotated with fully fledged linguistically informed grammatical representations that are produced by a deep linguistic processing grammar, thus consistently integrating morphological, syntactic and semantic information. We also report on how such corpus permits to straightforwardly obtain a whole range of past generation annotated corpora (POS, NER and morphology), current generation treebanks (constituency treebanks, dependency banks, propbanks) and next generation databanks (logical form banks) simply by means of a very residual selection/extraction effort to get the appropriate ""views"" exposing the relevant layers of information.

In the present paper we report on the development of a cluster of web services of language technology for Portuguese that we named as LXService. These web services permit the direct interaction of client applications with language processing tools via the Internet. This way of making available language technology was motivated by the need of its integration in an eLearning environment. In particular, it was motivated by the development of new multilingual functionalities that were aimed at extending a Learning Management System and that needed to resort to the outcome of some of those tools in a distributed and remote fashion. This specific usage situation happens however to be representative of a typical and recurrent set up in the utilization of language processing tools in different settings and projects. Therefore, the approach reported here offers not only a solution for this specific problem, which immediately motivated it, but contributes also some first steps for what we see as an important paradigm shift in terms of the way language technology can be distributed and find a better way to unleash its full potential and impact.