Welcome

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that we need more lexical resources for any natural language whatsoever. And if there is a lack of lexical resources for natural language processing of English texts, the problem is ten-fold more acute for other languages, such as Portuguese, which lack even easily accessible corpora and basic tools such as tokenizers, taggers and splitters. This lack of resources slows down considerably, almost stops, any work on reasoning about knowledge obtained from language, the main goal of the project on Textual Inference Logic (TIL), coordinated by Alexandre Rademaker (EMAp/FGV) and Valéria de Paiva (Rearden Commerce, CA).

The TIL project, funded by the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) aims to, in the long run, use formal logical tools to reason about knowledge obtained from text in Portuguese. We are mostly logicians, not linguists, so we want to minimize the amount of Computational Linguistics that we have to develop. To help develop the necessary basic tools, we are stimulating the collaboration with different groups of researchers working in similar problems and trying to investigate how results obtained from natural language processing research in other languages can be adapted and applied to Portuguese.

This is the first meeting of the project and is planned for 21-25th Nov 2011. We are calling this meeting "Logics and Ontologies for Portuguese thinking of the ultimate goals. The schedule of the meeting consists of a mini course of 5 days and some other formal and informal presentations followed by discussions. All interested parties are invited to join efforts.

Our main speakers are Gerard de Melo and Valeria de Paiva.

From Gerard de Melo we intend to learn lots about YAGO and MENTA and his clever methods to extract information from open sources like Wikipedia.

Valéria de Paiva shall introduce people to SUMO and Sigma and then hopefully talk about "Natural Logic and Contexts for Quantification".

We have also the following invited speakers:

  • Asla de Sá, FGV
  • Christian Nunes Aranha, Cortex Intelligence
  • Diego Munk London, UFRJ
  • Edward Hermann, PUC
  • Isabel Cafezeiro, UFF
  • Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar, UFC
  • Moacyr Alvim Horta Barbosa da Silva, FGV
  • Renato Rocha Souza, FGV
  • Suemi Higuchi, FGV
  • Vládia Pinheiro, UFC