LeMe-PT: A Medical Package Leaflet Corpus for Portuguese

The current trend on natural language processing is the use of machine learning. This is being done on every field, from summarization to machine translation. For these techniques to be applied, resources are needed, namely quality corpora. While there are large quantities of corpora for the Portuguese language, there is the lack of technical and focused corpora. Therefore, in this article we present a new corpus, built from drug package leaflets. We describe its structure and contents, and discuss possible exploration directions

Sequencing educational resources with Seqins

Existing adaptive educational hypermedia systems have been using learning resources sequencing approaches in order to enrich the learning experience. In this context, educational resources, either expository or evaluative, play a central role. However, there is a lack of tools that support sequencing essentially due to the fact that existing specifications are complex. This paper presents Seqins as a sequencing tool of digital educational resources. Seqins includes a simple and flexible sequencing model that will foster heterogeneous students to learn at different rhythms. The tool communicates through the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability specification with a plethora of e-learning systems such as learning management systems, repositories, authoring and automatic evaluation systems. In order to validate Seqins we integrate it in an e-learning Ensemble framework instance for the computer programming learning domain

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC

Measuring the understandability of WSDL specifications, web service understanding degree approach and system

Web Services (WS) are fundamental software artifacts for building service oriented applications and they are usually reused by others. Therefore they must be analyzed and comprehended for maintenance tasks: identification of critical parts, bug fixing, adaptation and improvement. In this article, WSDLUD a method aimed at measuring a priori the understanding degree (UD) of WSDL (Web Service Description Language) descriptions is presented. In order to compute UD several criteria useful to measure the understanding’s complexity of WSDL descriptions must be defined. These criteria are used by LSP (Logic Scoring of Preference), a multicriteria evaluation method, for producing a Global Preference value that indicates the satisfaction level of the WSDL description regarding the evaluation focus, in this case, the understanding degree. All the criteria information required by LSP is extracted from WSDL descriptions by using static analysis techniques and processed by specific algorithms which allow gathering semantic information. This process allows to obtain a priori information about the comprehension difficulty which proves our research hypotheses that states that it is possible to compute the understanding degree of a WSDL description.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Rapport : a fact-based question answering system for portuguese

Question answering is one of the longest-standing problems in natural language processing. Although natural language interfaces for computer systems can be considered more common these days, the same still does not happen regarding access to specific textual information. Any full text search engine can easily retrieve documents containing user specified or closely related terms, however it is typically unable to answer user questions with small passages or short answers. The problem with question answering is that text is hard to process, due to its syntactic structure and, to a higher degree, to its semantic contents. At the sentence level, although the syntactic aspects of natural language have well known rules, the size and complexity of a sentence may make it difficult to analyze its structure. Furthermore, semantic aspects are still arduous to address, with text ambiguity being one of the hardest tasks to handle. There is also the need to correctly process the question in order to define its target, and then select and process the answers found in a text. Additionally, the selected text that may yield the answer to a given question must be further processed in order to present just a passage instead of the full text. These issues take also longer to address in languages other than English, as is the case of Portuguese, that have a lot less people working on them. This work focuses on question answering for Portuguese. In other words, our field of interest is in the presentation of short answers, passages, and possibly full sentences, but not whole documents, to questions formulated using natural language. For that purpose, we have developed a system, RAPPORT, built upon the use of open information extraction techniques for extracting triples, so called facts, characterizing information on text files, and then storing and using them for answering user queries done in natural language. These facts, in the form of subject, predicate and object, alongside other metadata, constitute the basis of the answers presented by the system. Facts work both by storing short and direct information found in a text, typically entity related information, and by containing in themselves the answers to the questions already in the form of small passages. As for the results, although there is margin for improvement, they are a tangible proof of the adequacy of our approach and its different modules for storing information and retrieving answers in question answering systems. In the process, in addition to contributing with a new approach to question answering for Portuguese, and validating the application of open information extraction to question answering, we have developed a set of tools that has been used in other natural language processing related works, such as is the case of a lemmatizer, LEMPORT, which was built from scratch, and has a high accuracy. Many of these tools result from the improvement of those found in the Apache OpenNLP toolkit, by pre-processing their input, post-processing their output, or both, and by training models for use in those tools or other, such as MaltParser. Other tools include the creation of interfaces for other resources containing, for example, synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, or the creation of lists of, for instance, relations between verbs and agents, using rules

Annual record no. 49

INHIGEO produces an annual publication that includes information on the commission's activities, national reports, book reviews, interviews and occasional historical articles.N

Skyler and Bliss

Hong Kong remains the backdrop to the science fiction movies of my youth. The city reminds me of my former training in the financial sector. It is a city in which I could have succeeded in finance, but as far as art goes it is a young city, and I am a young artist. A frustration emerges; much like the mould, the artist also had to develop new skills by killing off his former desires and manipulating technology. My new series entitled HONG KONG surface project shows a new direction in my artistic research in which my technique becomes ever simpler, reducing the traces of pixelation until objects appear almost as they were found and photographed. Skyler and Bliss presents tectonic plates based on satellite images of the Arctic. Working in a hot and humid Hong Kong where mushrooms grow ferociously, a city artificially refrigerated by climate control, this series provides a conceptual image of a imaginary typographic map for survival. (Laurent Segretier