Chierchia 1998 proposes that languages vary in terms of what they allow their NPs to denote. This variation is encoded in a semantic parameter which determines whether NPs denote names of kinds (and are therefore argumental) [+arg, -pred], predicates (and therefore require a determiner to be in an argument position) [-arg, +pred] or either [+arg, +pred]. In this paper we argue using data from b...

This study aims to investigate the role of intonation in the perception of emotion in spoken Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Recordings of 32 BP speakers were downloaded from the internet and presented to 36 listeners divided equally into two nationality groups (Brazilian vs. English). The participants performed two perception experiments, one based on normal speech and the other on delexicalised (l...

Writing well in English is a challenge for non-native English speakers. When readers are unable to comprehend what they read they just give up reading and fail to get to the content. In this paper we describe problems encountered in the English writing of scientific abstracts by Brazilian Portuguese speakers. We collected and analyzed a corpus of 115 abstracts in which we identified specific la...

This article analyzes the process of vowel reduction in function words by Brazilian speakers of English as a Foreign Language. It compares information obtained by perceptual verification with those obtained by acoustic verification. The sample is composed by sixteen female speakers of English as a FL and one native speaker of English. Data collection was accomplished through an instrument compo...

OBJECTIVES: To develop a version of the modified Japanese Orthopaedic Association (mJOA) scale that had been translated into Portuguese and cross-culturally adapted for the Brazilian population. METHODS: The well-established process of forward-backward translation was employed along with cross-cultural adaptation. RESULTS: Three bilingual translators (English and native Portuguese) performe...

PURPOSE to translate from English into Portuguese, adapt culturally and validate the Female Sexual Function Index (FSFI). METHODS knowing the objectives of this research, two Brazilian translators have prepared a version each from the FSFI into Portuguese. Both versions have then been retro-translated into English by two English translators. After harmonizing the differences, they have been p...

Advances in speech processing research rely on the availability of public resources such as corpora, statistical models and baseline systems. In contrast to languages such as English, there are few specific resources for Brazilian Portuguese. This work describes efforts aiming to decrease such gap. Baseline acoustic models for Brazilian Portuguese were built using the CMU Sphinx toolkit and pub...

The generation of natural language from Resource Description Framework (RDF) data has recently gained significant attention due to the continuous growth of Linked Data. A number of these approaches generate natural language in languages other than English, however, no work has been proposed to generate Brazilian Portuguese texts out of RDF. We address this research gap by presenting RDF2PT, an ...

The availability of machine-readable bilingual linguistic resources is crucial not only for machine translation but also for other applications such as cross-lingual information retrieval. However, the building of such resources demands extensive manual work. This paper describes a methodology to build automatically bilingual dictionaries and transfer rules by extracting knowledge from word-ali...