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

Gauging Portuguese community pharmacy users' perceptions

Objective: To assess perceptions related to facets of community pharmacy usage within the Portuguese general population. Methods: An ONSA (The Governmental Public Health Observatory) instrument was used, the ECOS (Em Casa Observamos Saúde) sample. This consisted of a national representative sample of household units with telephone. General demographics and pharmacy users’ perceptions related to five facets of community pharmacy usage were collected by telephone interviews. Main Results: Almost one-third (31.9%) of the participants were probable chronic drug users, hence in regular contact with the community pharmacy. Thirty-four percent preferred not to talk with the person who dispenses their prescribed drugs. Most users (47.6%) expressed opinions of pharmacists as being health care rather than business oriented, although one quarter of the sample was not sure. A large majority (73.7%) would like pharmacists to participate in their treatment decisions, but 55.1% did not seem able to distinguish between pharmacists and non-pharmacist technical staff, working at the pharmacy counter. Most significant predictors of users’ dichotomous perceptions related to the usage facets surveyed were age, education and occupation. Being older, less literate and economically inactive increased the odds of inappropriate users’ perceptions of the pharmacists. Conclusions: Results showed that erroneous concepts and behaviours exist within the Portuguese population in relation to the community pharmacists’ role. This is a matter for pharmacy professional and educational bodies to take into account when developing intervention strategies, in particular when communicating with the general public

Knowledge Representation of Crime-Related Events: a Preliminary Approach

The crime is spread in every daily newspaper, and particularly on criminal investigation reports produced by several Police departments, creating an amount of data to be processed by Humans. Other research studies related to relation extraction (a branch of information retrieval) in Portuguese arisen along the years, but with few extracted relations and several computer methods approaches, that could be improved by recent features, to achieve better performance results. This paper aims to present the ongoing work related to SEM (Simple Event Model) ontology population with instances retrieved from crime-related documents, supported by an SVO (Subject, Verb, Object) algorithm using hand-crafted rules to extract events, achieving a performance measure of 0.86 (F-Measure)

Is the polarity of content producers strongly influenced by the results of the event?

This paper presents an approach to compare two types of data, subjective data (Polarity of Pan American Games 2011 event by country) and objective data (the number of medals won by each participating country), based on the Pearson corre- lation. When dealing with events described by people, knowledge acquisition is difficult because their structure is heterogeneous and subjective. A first step towards knowing the polarity of the information provided by people consists in automatically classifying the posts into clusters according to their polarity. The authors carried out a set of experiments using a corpus that consists of 5600 posts extracted from 168 Internet resources related to a specific event: the 2011 Pan American games. The approach is based on four components: a crawler, a filter, a synthesizer and a polarity analyzer. The PanAmerican approach automatically classifies the polarity of the event into clusters with the following results: 588 positive, 336 neutral, and 76 negative. Our work found out that the polarity of the content produced was strongly influenced by the results of the event with a correlation of .74. Thus, it is possible to conclude that the polarity of content is strongly affected by the results of the event. Finally, the accuracy of the PanAmerican approach is: .87, .90, and .80 according to the precision of the three classes of polarity evaluated

The importance of training EFL teachers for affect teaching strategies

The purpose of this study is to identify whether there is a relationship between the use of affect teaching strategies and consequently an increase in the language learning motivation/proficiency. Raising teachers’ awareness to the relevance of affective issues is a priority, which will be reflected in the creation of a supportive classroom atmosphere in which learners can be encouraged to do better, to work harder in an effort to reach their full learning potential. However, prior to understanding teachers’, learners’ perceptions needed to be analyzed to be able to confront both. A screening model was used in this qualitative research study. Additional tools like questionnaires were also applied in order to: (a) establish a relation between teaching strategies which promote affect and students’ reactions to them; (b) study EFL teachers’ concrete perceptions on the concept of teaching strategies which promote affect; (c) understand if and how EFL teachers are applying affect teaching strategies while specifying which ones; (d) establish the importance of integrating affect in EFL teachers’ training. Since Russia initiated a full-size military invasion into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, millions of Ukrainians were forced to flee to neighboring countries (mostly women and children). The hosting countries, including Portugal allowed for Ukrainian learners immediate integration in their national schooling systems, thus changing educators’ teaching realities. This has led me to reflect on the relevance of affect in a situation of war/refugee crisis. It became therefore relevant to understand to what extent ELT teachers felt prepared to embrace this new multicultural and sensitive educational context and to question if EFL educators specific training on refugee affect teaching strategies is not a current necessity

Wind energy and local community perceptions

Portugal has seen in recent years an increased growth of wind farm’s deployment in its northern region, in accordance with national legal framework and current energy policies. The majority of existing academic studies focusing on impacts (benefits or costs) resulting from deployment of this technology, mainly addressee these aspects from a global point of view. Notwithstanding wind power projects have also been associated with significant impacts directly affecting local communities where these projects were implemented. This paper aims to identify such local impacts, reflecting local community’s perspective through the use of interviews. A comparative analysis of the reported impacts and the way they are being perceived by the local stakeholders, with the results from previous studies on the topic was attempted. Results demonstrated that the majority of interviewees did not point out disadvantages significantly altering their quality of life, revealing a consensual acceptance of benefits from these projects. The major importance of this sort of energy investments and of associated benefits was recognized. Revenues attributed to Communal Land Commission, in charge of managing the land destined to wind farm deployment, were perceived as highly favourable, allowing to answer local community’s needs.This work was financed by: the QREN – Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors, the European Union – European Regional Development Fund and National Funds- Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-011377 and Project Pest-OE/EME/UI0252/2011

Whatever happened to planning? Italy after EU intervention

As clearly stated by the Conference's proposal, after a decade of European urban and spatial policies, it seems the time now for a deeper reflection on their influences in spatial and urban planning practices in the EU countries. A brief survey on what concerns Italy allows us to observe that EU planning intervention has affected practically all the levels of territorial government, through many dimensions of what is first and foremost a material innovation, triggered as if by contamination by the arrival on the scene of the new institutional player. Changes are mainly visible in: - the shaping of spatial frameworks for planning policies; - the proliferation of new, different tools for regional and urban planning; - a progressive re-equilibrium between "central" and "peripheral" regions; - new institutional and administrative attitudes to negotiation and partnership; - the cultural way of treating urban problems and conceiving planning; - new emerging competences and "jobs" for planners. A reflection on the deepest meaning of those many changes - and, more generally, on the substantial reasons of the (not institutionalised) EU intervention in planning policies - could contribute to better understanding on what, not only in Italy, can be expected from EU planning and what, consequently, can be improved in European development strategie

Gaming in a benchmarking environment. A non-parametric analysis of benchmarking in the water sector

This paper discusses the use of benchmarking in general and its application to the drinking water sector. It systematizes the various classifications on performance measurement, discusses some of the pitfalls of benchmark studies and provides some examples of benchmarking in the water sector. After presenting in detail the institutional framework of the water sector of the Belgian region of Flanders (without benchmarking experiences), Wallonia (recently started a public benchmark) and the Netherlands (introduced already in 1997 a public benchmark), we non-parametrically measure the productivity gains by the use of a dynamic Malmquist index. The three regions, each at a different stage of the benchmarking circle, exhibit different performance trends. The ‘carrot’ and the ‘stick’ of benchmarking seem to offer an effective incentive to trigger performance. In addition, the Malmquist decompositions provide some evidence on the ‘gaming’ of the stakeholders by the water utilities.Benchmarking; gaming; Malmquist decomposition; regulation; water sector