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.