Oto Vale

Automatic Detection of Proverbs and their Variants

This article presents the task of automatic detection of proverbs in Brazilian Portuguese, from the intersection of the regular syntactic structure of proverbs and their core elements. We created finite-state automata that enabled us to look for these word combinations in running texts. The rationale behind this method consists in the fact that although proverbs may have a normal sentence structure and often a very commonly used lexicon, their specific word-combinations may enables us to identify them and their variants irrespective of the syntactic or structural changes the proverb may undergo. The goal of this task is to gather the largest number of proverbs and their variants. The results showed precision 60.15%. 1998 ACM Subject ClassificationI.2.7 Natural Language Processing

An Evolutionary Method for Natural Language to SQL Translation

In this paper, we propose a new methodology where complex natural language requests from a user to a relational database are broken into simple sentences through an Evolutionary Computing method. Such basic sentences are then translated by another module, which tries to perform a pattern matching between a model filled by local grammars and the basic sentences generated by the Evolutionary Programming algorithm. The output of this system is a set of SQL queries to a specific database. The main feature is its combinatorial approach, as an alternative for the use of methods that employs many linguistic levels (lexicon, syntax rules and semantics) and intermediate languages. The proposed methodology is applied to Brazilian Portuguese. In our test bed, a 92% translation correctness was achieved.

Proverb Variation: Experiments on Automatic Detection in Brazilian Portuguese Texts

This paper describes a methodology for automatically identifying proverbs and their variants in running texts. This methodology is based on existing compilations of proverbs, by exploring the regular syntactic structures that most proverbs present and intersecting syntactic structure with the lexical units of the proverbs. From the syntactic regularities we divided the data into 13 different classes. Finite-state automata is used to represent the regular patterns found in the classes. The results showed a precision rate of 74.68% tested in Brazilian Portuguese journalistic corpus.

The fuzzy boundaries of operator verb and support verb constructions with dar ``give'' and ter ``have'' in Brazilian Portuguese

This paper describes the fuzzy boundaries between support verb constructions (SVC) with ter “have” and dar “give” and causative operator verb (VopC) constructions involving these same verbs, in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), which form a complex set of relations: (i) both verbs are the support verb of the same noun (SVC); (ii) dar is the standard (active-like) SVC while ter is a converse (passive-like) SVC; and (iii) dar is a VopC, operating on a ter SVC. In this paper we have systematically studied these complex relations involving SVC and VopC for BP, which constitute a challenge to Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, and have been often ignored in related work. The paper proposes a lexically-based strategy to implement SVC in a fully-fledged, rule-based parsing system, yielding an adequate semantic structure of the events (predicates) denoted by predicative nouns in SVC.

Tipologia das construções verbais em PB: uma proposta de classificação do verbo dar

Resumo: O presente artigo apresenta uma proposta de classificacao das ocorrencias do verbo dar em portugues do Brasil. O objetivo da classificacao e indicar uma taxonomia verbal que possa ser expandida e adaptada para a descricao de outros verbos da lingua. Com base no modelo teorico-metodologico do Lexico- Gramatica (GROSS, 1975, 1981), foram analisados os colocados do verbo dar , em suas mais diversas ocorrencias, e essa analise levou a uma classificacao sintatico-semântica do verbo, a qual preve as seguintes categorias: verbo pleno, verbo-suporte, verbo causativo, construcao gramatical, constituinte de expressao cristalizada e constituinte de proverbio. Todas essas categorias podem ser desmembradas em outras subcategorias que abarcam todas as ocorrencias do verbo dar no corpus PLN.Br Full. Palavras-chave: Tipologia verbal; classificacao sintatico-semântica; verbo dar . Abstract: This paper presents a proposal for classifying the occurrences of the verb dar ( give ) in Brazilian Portuguese. The classification aims to provide a verbal taxonomy which can be expanded and adapted for describing other verbs of the language. Based on Lexicon-Grammar theory and methodology (GROSS, 1975, 1981), the collocates of verb dar ( give ) were analyzed, and * Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos 106 CALIGRAMA, Belo Horizonte, v.18, n.2, p. 105-130, 2013 this analysis led to a syntactic-semantic classification, resulting in the following categories: plain verb, support verb, causative verb, grammatical construction, idiomatic expression constituent and proverb constituent. All these categories can be redefined into subcategories relative to all other occurrences of the verb dar ( give ) in PLN.Br Full corpus . Keywords: Verbal typology; syntactic-semantic classification; verb dar ( give ).

Elaboração de um glossário automático bilíngüe com base no modelo de classes de objetos

The aim of this study is to create a bilingual electronic glossary, which is based on corpora of cooking recipes either in Portuguese and French. Gaston Grosss model of object classes is the one in which this research is based on. Using the analysis of three dictionaries, a gap was found in terms of equivalence criteria, which could make them inefficient for the dictionary user. This problem of equivalence was what motivated this study. As a result, this glossary is expected to efficiently cover a larger range of the proposed equivalence as an electronic language tool.