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 Classification I.2.7 Natural Language Processing