Humor is an intricate part of verbal communication and dealing with this kind of phenomenon is essential to building systems that can process language at large with all of its complexities. In this paper, we introduce Puntuguese, a new corpus of punning humor in Portuguese, motivated by previous works showing that currently available corpora for this language are still unfit for Machine Learning due to data leakage. Puntuguese comprises 4,903 manually-gathered punning one-liners in Brazilian and European Portuguese. To create negative examples that differ exclusively in terms of funniness, we carried out a micro-editing process, in which all jokes were edited by fluent Portuguese speakers to make the texts unfunny. Finally, we did some experiments on Humor Recognition, showing that Puntuguese is considerably more difficult than the previous corpus, achieving an F1-Score of 68.9%. With this new dataset, we hope to enable research not only in NLP but also in other fields that are interested in studying humor; thus, the data is publicly available.

Towards computational systems capable of dealing with complex and general linguistic phenomena, it is essential to understand figurative language, which verbal humor is an instance of. This paper reports state-of-the-art results for Humor Recognition in Portuguese, specifically, an F1-score of 99.64% with a BERT-based classifier. However, following the surprising high performance in such a challenging task, we further analyzed what was actually learned by the classifiers. Our main conclusions were that classifiers based on content-features achieve the best performance, but rely mostly on stylistic aspects of the text, not necessarily related to humor, such as punctuation and question words. On the other hand, for humor-related features, we identified some important aspects, such as the presence of named entities, ambiguity and incongruity.

Dealing with humor is an important step to develop Natural Language Processing tools capable of handling sophisticated semantic and pragmatic knowledge. In this context, this PhD thesis focuses on the automatic generation and recognition of verbal punning humor in Portuguese, which is still an underdeveloped language when compared to English. One of the main goals of this research is to conciliate Natural Language Generation computational models with existing theories of humor from the Humanities while avoiding mere generation by including contextual information into the generation process. Another point that is of utmost importance is the inclusion of the listener as an active part in the process of understanding and creating humor; we hope to achieve this by using concepts from Recommender Systems in our methods. Ultimately, we want to not only advance the current state-of-the-art in humor generation and recognition, but also to help the general Portuguese-speaking research community with methods, tools and resources that may aid in the development of further techniques for this language. We also expect our systems to provide insightful ideas about how humor is created and perceived by both humans and machines.

The amount of information available online can be overwhelming for users to digest, specially when dealing with other users’ comments when making a decision about buying a product or service. In this context, opinion summarization systems are of great value, extracting important information from the texts and presenting them to the user in a more understandable manner. It is also known that the usage of semantic representations can benefit the quality of the generated summaries. This paper aims at developing opinion summarization methods based on Abstract Meaning Representation of texts in the Brazilian Portuguese language. Four different methods have been investigated, alongside some literature approaches. The results show that a Machine Learning-based method produced summaries of higher quality, outperforming other literature techniques on manually constructed semantic graphs. We also show that using parsed graphs over manually annotated ones harmed the output. Finally, an analysis of how important different types of information are for the summarization process suggests that using Sentiment Analysis features did not improve summary quality.

Machine Translation (MT) is one of the most important natural language processing applications. Independently of the applied MT approach, a MT system automatically generates an equivalent version (in some target language) of an input sentence (in some source language). Recently, a new MT approach has been proposed: neural machine translation (NMT). NMT systems have already outperformed traditional phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) systems for some pairs of languages. However, any MT approach outputs errors. In this work we present a comparative study of MT errors generated by a NMT system and a PBSMT system trained on the same English – Brazilian Portuguese parallel corpus. This is the first study of this kind involving NMT for Brazilian Portuguese. Furthermore, the analyses and conclusions presented here point out the specific problems of NMT outputs in relation to PBSMT ones and also give lots of insights into how to implement automatic post-editing for a NMT system. Finally, the corpora annotated with MT errors generated by both PBSMT and NMT systems are also available.