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"Portuguese language Texts"
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Portuguese
An essential, comprehensive guide for all who are interested in learning the Portuguese language and mastering its complexities, Portuguese: A Reference Manual supplements the phonetic and grammatical explanations offered in basic textbooks. While the Manual focuses on Brazilian Portuguese, it incorporates European Portuguese variants and thus provides a more complete description of the language. Accessible to non-linguists and novice language learners, as well as informative for instructors of Portuguese and specialists in other languages, this guide incorporates the Orthographic Accord (in effect since 2009–2010), which attempts to standardize Portuguese orthography. The Manual reflects the language as it is currently taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels by providing detailed explanations of the sound and writing systems and the grammar of the principal Portuguese dialects. A reference guide rather than a textbook, the Manual also provides extensive verb charts, as well as comparisons of Portuguese with English and Spanish.
eBook
Pois não
Spanish speakers can learn Brazilian Portuguese much more rapidly than any other language, and thousands of students have used Antônio Simões's text/workbook Com licença: Brazilian Portuguese for Spanish Speakers to make the transition between the two languages. Recognizing the need for a text that incorporates current cultural references and the latest language pedagogy, Simões now offers Pois não: Brazilian Portuguese Course for Spanish Speakers, with Basic Reference Grammar. Pois não contrasts Portuguese and Spanish, which accomplishes two main goals. It teaches the equivalent of one year of college Portuguese in one semester, three times a week, to Spanish speakers who also have a solid understanding of English. Additionally, the book serves as a basic reference guide to Brazilian Portuguese for the same audience. Pois não can be used by students in the classroom or by independent learners. Users of the book may focus on the drills alone, concentrate on both the explanations and drills, or use the book as a reference for consultation only. Answers to all of the exercises are included in the book. Audio and video recordings by native Brazilian speakers of dialogues that appear in the book can be downloaded at https://utexas.box.com/v/PoisNaoAudio.
eBook
The written production of argumentative and dissertation text: a didactic project based on Bakhtin's philosophy
This article is characterized as a theoretical and practical research related to a project developed during the year 2015 in two schools - one public, the other private- , in the city of Birigui, State of São Paulo, Brazil. The main goal of the study was to analyze: the pedagogical project and the teachers’ activities oriented towards teaching and learning of argumentative and dissertation texts. The methodology used in this research comprised: (i) visiting both schools, (ii) producing a description of ongoing school practices, with focus on the teaching of argumentative and dissertation texts, (iii) suggesting a teacher’s activity to improve this apprenticeship, (iv) putting this activity into practice and (v) analyzing obtained results. The theoretical framework used for this study was the Bakhtinian philosophy (BAKHTIN, 2013; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2010; 2013; VOLOSHINOV, 1986). This theoretical approach was chosen due to the importance of comprehension of the text not just as an amalgamated set of words, phrases and paragraphs; other than that, we understand it as a structure of meaning, in which we encounter linguistic forms, ideologies and discursive stance. At last, we can say the results show that the argumentative texts render assistance to the development of the students’ argumentative competence and skill, that is, in their ability to argue and organize ideas in a communicative situation.
Journal Article
TTS-Portuguese Corpus: a corpus for speech synthesis in Brazilian Portuguese
Speech provides a natural way for human–computer interaction. In particular, speech synthesis systems are popular in different applications, such as personal assistants, GPS applications, screen readers and accessibility tools. However, not all languages are on the same level when in terms of resources and systems for speech synthesis. This work consists of creating publicly available resources for Brazilian Portuguese in the form of a novel dataset along with deep learning models for end-to-end speech synthesis. Such dataset has 10.5 h from a single speaker, from which a Tacotron 2 model with the RTISI-LA vocoder presented the best performance, achieving a 4.03 MOS value. The obtained results are comparable to related works covering English language and the state-of-the-art in European Portuguese.
Journal Article
NILC-Metrix: assessing the complexity of written and spoken language in Brazilian Portuguese
The objective of this paper is to present and make publicly available the NILC-Metrix, a computational system comprising 200 metrics proposed in studies on discourse, psycholinguistics, cognitive and computational linguistics, to assess textual complexity in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The metrics are relevant for descriptive analysis and the creation of computational models and can be used to extract information from various linguistic levels of written and spoken language. The metrics were developed during the last 13 years, starting in the end of 2007, within the scope of the PorSimples project. Once the PorSimples finished, new metrics were added to the initial 48 metrics of the Coh-Metrix-Port tool. Coh-Metrix-Port adapted some metrics to BP from the Coh-Metrix tool that computes metrics related to cohesion and coherence of texts in English. Given the large number of metrics, we present them following an organisation similar to the metrics of Coh-Metrix v3.0 to facilitate comparisons made with metrics in Portuguese and English, in future studies using both tools. In this paper, we illustrate the potential of the NILC-Metrix by presenting three applications: (i) a descriptive analysis of the differences between children’s film subtitles and texts written for Elementary School I (comprises classes from 1st to 5th grade) and II (Final Years) (comprises classes from 6th to 9th grade, in an age group that corresponds to the transition between childhood and adolescence); (ii) a new predictor of textual complexity for the corpus of original and simplified texts of the PorSimples project; (iii) a complexity prediction model for school grades, using transcripts of children’s story narratives told by teenagers. For each application, we evaluate which groups of metrics are more discriminative, showing their contribution for each task.
Journal Article