Luís Pimentel Trigo

Abstract
Palatal consonants in Portuguese are considered complex or marked segments because they are inherently heavy and restricted in terms of their distribution, in relation to other consonants. Moreover, they appear to display differences between themselves, as first language acquisition and creoles' adaptation suggest that /L/ is more complex than /n/. The arguments for complexity are endorsed by some qualitative studies but are still lacking quantitative support. This paper aims at analyzing the phonological restrictiveness of these consonants by comparing their actual frequency in several different corpora, reporting both lexical entries and usage in discourse. In addition to their context-free frequency, we control for their word position and phonetic adjacency. We find that palatals are less frequent than other consonants. However, relative to each other, they do not display proportional lexical and usage frequencies. These results shed new light not only on the representation of /n/ and /L/ but also on the relation between frequency and markedness in language studies.

Abstract
Although phoneme selection is a well-studied subject in contact linguistics, phoneme integration is mostly unexplored. This study aims at assessing phoneme integration by measuring consonant frequency in Sri Lanka Portuguese and Portuguese. For that, we select two large lexical corpora and, take several preparation steps to make the data uniform, consistent and reusable. In terms of integration, we find that the more unconstrained a consonant is concerning its phonotactic patterns, the more frequent it is. We also find that being coronal has a positive impact on integration, whereas being palatal has a negative impact. Moreover, we find that in spite of the apparently random changes in the consonant frequency, consonant classes are robustly transmitted from the lexifier to this creole. Copyright © 2022 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract
Annotating a corpus with argument structures is a complex task, and it is even more challenging when addressing text genres where argumentative discourse markers do not abound. We explore a corpus of opinion articles annotated by multiple annotators, providing diverse perspectives of the argumentative content therein. New annotation aggregation methods are explored, diverging from the traditional ones that try to minimize presumed errors from annotator disagreement. The impact of our methods is assessed for the task of argument density prediction, seen as an initial step in the argument mining pipeline. We evaluate and compare models trained for this regression task in different generated datasets, considering their prediction error and also from a ranking perspective. Results confirm the expectation that addressing argument density from a ranking perspective is more promising than looking at the problem as a mere regression task. We also show that probabilistic aggregation, which weighs tokens by considering all annotators, is a more interesting approach, achieving encouraging results as it accommodates different annotator perspectives. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/DARGMINTS/argument-density. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract

Abstract
We present an Information Retrieval tool that facilitates the task of the user when searching for a particular information that is of interest to him. Our system processes a given set of documents to produce a graph, where nodes represent documents and links the similarities. The aim is to offer the user a tool to navigate in this space in an easy way. It is possible to collapse/expand nodes. Our case study shows affinity groups based on the similarities of text production of researchers. This goes beyond the already established communities revealed by co-authorship. The system characterizes the activity of each author by a set of automatically generated keywords and by membership to a particular affinity group. The importance of each author is highlighted visually by the size of the node corresponding to the number of publications and different measures of centrality. Regarding the validation of the method, we analyse the impact of using different combinations of titles, abstracts and keywords on capturing the similarity between researchers.