Computational processing of the Portuguese language

Since 1993, PROPOR Workshops have become an important forum for re- archers involved in the Computational Processing of Portuguese, both written and spoken. This PROPOR Workshop follows previous workshops held in 1993 (Lisboa, Portugal), 1996 (Curitiba, Brazil), 1998 (Porto Alegre, Brazil), 1999 ´ (Evora, Portugal) and 2000 (Atibaia, Brazil). The workshop has increasingly contributed to bring together researchers and industry partners from both sides of the Atlantic. The constitution of an international program committee and the adoption of high-standard referee procedures demonstrate the steady de- lopment of the ? eld and of its scienti? c community. This can also be seen in the realization of the satellite workshop AVALON, which constitutes the ? rst evaluation campaign of Portuguese NLP systems. Each one of the 64 submitted papers received a careful, triple blind-review by the program committee. All those who contributed are mentioned in the following pages. The reviewing process led to the selection of 41 papers for oral presentation, 24 regular papers and 17 short papers, which are published in this volume. Theworkshopandthisbookwerestructuredaroundtheeightfollowingmain topics: (i) speech analysis and recognition; (ii) speech synthesis; (iii) pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax, and the lexicon; (iv) tools, resources, and appli- tions; (v) dialogue systems; (vi) summarization and information extraction; and (vii) evaluation.