The best scientific paper at PROPOR 2024 – The 16th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese, is Portuguese and has DEI DNA. “Across the Atlantic: Distinguishing Between European and Brazilian Portuguese Dialects” was co-authored by David Preda (M.EIC), Tomás Osório (ProDEI) and Henrique Lopes Cardoso (DEI) and earned the distinction at what is considered to be the main scientific meeting in the area of language and speech technologies for the Portuguese/Galician language.
This year’s meeting was hosted by the University of Santiago de Compostela from 12 to 15 March, thus also opening up this biannual event, which has so far been held between Portugal and Brazil, to Galicia.
David Preda, lead author of the article and a final year student on the Master in Informatics and Computing Engineering, shares that this was the first conference he had attended and it couldn’t have been a more rewarding and enriching experience, not only because of the variety and high quality of the papers presented, but also because of the interaction between participants with great cultural differences but united by a common language.
The student also shares that it was during the first year of his master’s degree that he asked to join the weekly meetings with the researchers at LIACC who focus on NLP, led by Prof. Henrique Lopes Cardoso, which was an opportunity to research in the area and carry out more exploratory work, the type of project he particularly enjoys, resulting in this article.
David is now developing his master’s thesis under the guidance of Luis Filipe Teixeira and Isabel Rio-Torto (DEI), focusing on Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the medical domain, and will try to explore ways in which the connection between the vision and language domains can improve performance and/or reduce the amount of data needed and possibly apply the developed strategies to other fields, such as medical imaging.
As for the future, the final year student still sees it undefined but believes that it won’t be in Portugal and that it will, in one way or another, involve Artificial Intelligence with a focus on the textual domain.