Contact information

• email address
  js@il.va@di.fc..ul.pt
• postal address
  Sala 6.3.32, Edifício C6
  Departamento de Informática
  Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa
  Campo Grande, 1749-016 Lisboa
  Portugal
  

Current activities

• Scientific Resources and Users Support Manager of PORTULAN CLARIN Research Infrastructure for the Science and Technology of Language
• Postdoctoral Researcher at NLX—Natural Language and Speech Group of the Department of Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon

Publications

• Gomes, Luís, António Branco, João Silva, Ruben Branco
  , 2024. From greatest simplicity to full power: Research-Infrastructure-as-a-Service for language science and technology. Language Resources and Evaluation.
• Santos, Rodrigo, João Silva, António Branco
  , 2024. Leveraging LLMs for On-the-Fly Instruction-Guided Image Editing. In Proceedings of the 23nd Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA).
• Santos, Rodrigo, João Silva, Luís Gomes, João Rodrigues, António Branco
  , 2024. Advancing Generative AI for Portuguese with Open Decoder Gervásio PT*. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the ELRA-ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL2024).
• Santos, Rodrigo, João Rodrigues, Luís Gomes, João Silva, António Branco, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Tomás Osório, Bernardo Leite
  , 2024. Fostering the Ecosystem of Open Neural Encoders for Portuguese with Albertina PT* Family. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the ELRA-ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL2024).

• Rodrigues, João, Luís Gomes, João Silva, António Branco, Rodrigo Santos, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Tomás Osório
  , 2023. Advancing Neural Encoding of Portuguese with Transformer Albertina PT-*. In Proceedings of the 22nd Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA).
• Branco, António, Sara Grilo, João Silva
  , 2023. Language Report Portuguese. In Georg Rehm and Andy Way (eds.), European Language Equality: A Strategic Agenda for Digital Language Equality, Chapter 30. Springer.

• Santos, Rodrigo, António Branco, João Silva
  , 2022. Cost-effective language driven image editing with LX-DRIM. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Performance and Interpretability Evaluations of Multimodal, Multipurpose, Massive-Scale Models (MMMPIE, co-located with COLING 2022), pp. 31–43.
• Santos, Rodrigo, António Branco, João Silva
  , 2022. Language driven image editing via Transformers. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2022).
• Gomes, Luís, Ruben Branco, João Silva, António Branco
  , 2022. Open and inclusive language processing: Language processing services by PORTULAN to meet the widest needs of CLARIN users. CLARIN: The Infrastructure for Language Resources. Darja Fišer and Andreas Witt (eds). De Gruyter.
• Silva, João, Sara Grilo, Márcia Bolrinha, Rodrigo Santos, Luís Gomes, António Branco, Rui Vaz
  , 2022. Where do I belong in six centuries of literature? Datasets and AI-based tools for Portuguese literary documents made possible and available by PORTULAN CLARIN. CLARIN: The Infrastructure for Language Resources. Darja Fišer and Andreas Witt (eds). De Gruyter.
• Branco, António, João Silva, Luís Gomes, João Rodrigues
  , 2022. Universal Grammatical Dependencies for Portuguese with CINTIL Data, LX Processing and CLARIN support. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022).

• Branco, Ruben, António Branco, João Rodrigues, João Silva
  , 2021. Shortcutted Commonsense: Data Spuriousness in Deep Learning of Commonsense Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 1504–1521. Outstanding paper.
• Branco, Ruben, António Branco, João Rodrigues, João Silva
  , 2021. Commonsense Reasoning: How do Neuro-Only and Hybrid Neuro-Symbolic Approaches Compare? In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM): Workshop on Knowledge Injection in Neural Networks (KINN).
• Santos, Rodrigo, João Silva, António Branco
  , 2021. More Data is Better Only to Some Level, After Which it is Harmful: Profiling Neural Machine Translation Self-Learning with Back-Translation. In Proceedings of 20th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA), pp. 727–738.

• Grilo, Sara, Márcia Bolrinha, João Silva, Rui Vaz, António Branco
  , 2020. The BDCamões Collection of Portuguese Literary Documents: a Research Resource for Digital Humanities and Language Technology. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pp. 842–847.
• Branco, António, Amália Mendes, Paulo Quaresma, Luís Gomes, João Silva, Andrea Teixeira
  , 2020. Infrastructure for the Science and Technology of Language PORTULAN CLARIN. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Language Technology Platforms (IWLTP), pp. 1–7.
• Branco, António, Sara Grilo, Márcia Bolrinha, Chakaveh Saedi, Ruben Branco, João Silva, Andreia Querido, Rita de Carvalho, Rosa Gaudio, Mariana Avelãs, Clara Pinto
  , 2020. The MWN.PT WordNet for Portuguese: Projection, Validation, Cross-lingual Alignment and Distribution. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pp. 4861–4868.
• Rodrigues, João, Ruben Branco, João Silva, António Branco
  , 2020. Reproduction and Revival of the Argument Reasoning Comprehension Task. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pp. 5057–5066.
• Santos, Rodrigo, João Silva, António Branco
  , 2020. Making the Most of Synthetic Parallel Texts: Portuguese-Chinese Neural Machine Translation Enhanced with Backtranslation. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR'20), pp. 121–130.
• Branco, António, Nicoletta Calzolari, Piek Vossen, Gertjan Van Noord, Dieter van Uytvanck, João Silva, Luís Gomes, André Moreira, Willem Elbers
  , 2020. A Shared Task of a New, Collaborative Type to Foster Reproducibility: A First Exercise in the Area of Language Science and Technology with REPROLANG2020. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pp. 5541–5547.

• Santos, Rodrigo, João Silva, António Branco, Deyi Xiong
  , 2019. The direct path may not be the best: Portuguese-Chinese neural machine translation. In Proceedings of 19th Conference on Artificial Intelligence (EPIA).

• Gomes, Luís, Frederico Apolónia, Ruben Branco, João Silva, António Branco
  , 2018. Setting up the PORTULAN / CLARIN repository. In Proceedings of the CLARIN Annual Conference.
• Saedi, Chakaveh, António Branco, João Rodrigues, João Silva
  , 2018. WordNet Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2018), 3rd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP (RepL4NLP).
• Rodrigues, João, Ruben Branco, João Silva, Chakaveh Saedi, António Branco
  , 2018. Predicting Brain Activation with WordNet Embeddings. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL2018), 8th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing (CogACLL).
• Rodrigues, João, Chakaveh Saedi, António Branco, João Silva
  , 2018. Semantic Equivalence Detection: Are Interrogatives Harder than Declaratives? In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018).
• Branco, António, Ruben Branco, Chakaveh Saedi, João Silva
  , 2018. Browsing and Supporting Pluricentric Global Wordnet, or just your Wordnet of Interest. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018).

• Maraev, Vladislav, Chakaveh Saedi, João Rodrigues, António Branco and João Silva
  , 2017. Character-Level Convolutional Neural Networks for Paraphrase Detection and Other Experiments. In Proceedings of the 6th Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Conference (AINL 2017).
• Rodrigues, João, Chakaveh Saedi, Vladislav Maraev, João Silva and António Branco
  , 2017. Ways of Asking and Replying in Duplicate Question Detection. In Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017).
• Saedi, Chakaveh, João Rodrigues, João Silva, António Branco and Vladislav Maraev
  , 2017. Learning Profiles in Duplicate Question Detection. In Proceedings of the IEEE 16th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IEEE IRI 2017).
• Querido, Andreia, Rita de Carvalho, João Rodrigues, Marcos Garcia, João Silva, Catarina Correia, Nuno Rendeiro, Rita Valadas Pereira, Marisa Campos, António Branco
  , 2017. LX-LR4DistSemEval: A Collection of Language Resources for the Evaluation of Distributional Semantic Models of Portuguese. Revista da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, 3.

• Querido, Andreia, Rita de Carvalho, João Rodrigues, João Silva, Steven Neale, Rita Valadas Pereira, Patrícia Gomes, Catarina Correia, Diana Amaral, António Branco
  , 2016. Named Entities in the QTLeap Corpus of Online Helpdesk Interactions. Revista da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, 2, pp. 459–474.
• de Carvalho, Rita, Andreia Querido, Marisa Campos, Rita Valadas Pereira, João Silva and António Branco
  , 2016. CINTIL DependencyBank PREMIUM: A Corpus of Grammatical Dependencies for Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16).
• Rodrigues, João, Luís Gomes, Steven Neale, Andreia Querido, Nuno Rendeiro, Sanja Štajner, João Silva and António Branco
  , 2016. Domain-Specific Hybrid Machine Translation from English to Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR'16).
• Neale, Steven, Rita Pereira, João Silva and António Branco
  , 2016. Lexical Semantics Annotation for Enriched Portuguese Corpora. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR'16).
• Rodrigues, João, António Branco, Steven Neale and João Silva
  , 2016. LX-DSemVectors: Distributional Semantics Models for Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR'16).
• Artetxe, Mikel, Gorka Labaka, Chakaveh Saedi, João Rodrigues, João Silva, António Branco, Eneko Agirre
  , 2016. Adding Syntactic Structure to Bilingual Terminology for Improved Domain Adaptation. In Proceedings of the 2nd Deep Machine Translation Workshop (DeepMT 2016), pp. 39–46.
• Gaudio, Rosa, Gorka Labaka, Eneko Agirre, Petya Osenova, Kiril Simov, Martin Popel, Dieke Oele, Gertjan van Noord, Luís Gomes, João Rodrigues, Steven Neale, João Silva, Andreia Querido, Nuno Rendeiro and António Branco
  , 2016. SMT and Hybrid Systems of the QTLeap Project in the WMT16 IT-Task. In Proceedings of the 1st First Conference on Machine Translation (WMT 2016), pp. 435–441.

• Branco, António, João Silva, Andreia Querido and Rita de Carvalho
  , 2015. CINTIL DependencyBank PREMIUM Handbook: Design Options for the Representation of Grammatical Dependencies. Technical Report TR-2015-5, Department of Informatics, University of Lisbon.
• Neale, Steven, João Silva and António Branco
  , 2015. An Accessible Interface Tool for Manual Word Sense Annotation. In Proceedings of the 11th Joint ACL-ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (ISA-11).
• Silva, João, João Rodrigues, Luís Gomes and António Branco
  , 2015. Bootstrapping a Hybrid Deep MT System. In Proceedings of the HyTra Workshop at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

• Silva, João
  , 2014. Robust Handling of Out-of-Vocabulary Words in Deep Language Processing. PhD Thesis, University of Lisbon.
• Rodrigues, João, Francisco Costa, João Silva and António Branco
  , 2014. Automatic Syllabification of Portuguese. In Actas do XXX Encontro Anual da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (APL'14).
• Branco, António, João Rodrigues, João Silva, Francisco Costa and Rui Vaz
  , 2014. Assessing Automatic Text Classification for Interactive Language Learning. In Proceedings of iSociety2014 - IEEE International Conference on Information Society, pp. 72–80.
• Branco, António, João Rodrigues, Francisco Costa, João Silva and Rui Vaz
  , 2014. Rolling out Text Categorization for Language Learning Assessment Supported by Language Technology. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR'14).
• Branco, António, Catarina Carvalheiro, Francisco Costa, Sérgio Castro, João Silva, Cláudia Martins and Joana Ramos
  , 2014. DeepBankPT and Companion Portuguese Treebanks in a Multilingual Collection of Treebanks. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR'14).

• Silva, João and António Branco
  , 2012. Assigning Deep Lexical Types Using Structured Classifier Features for Grammatical Dependencies. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Statistical Parsing and Semantic Processing of Morphologically Rich Languages at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'12), pp. 62–71.
• Silva, João and António Branco
  , 2012. Deep, Consistent and Also Useful: Extracting Vistas from Deep Corpora for Shallower Tasks. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Advanced Treebanking at the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pp. 45–52.
• Silva, João and António Branco
  , 2012. Assigning Deep Lexical Types. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD'12), pp. 240–247.
• Branco, António, Catarina Carvalheiro, Sílvia Pereira, Sara Silveira, João Silva, Sérgio Castro and João Graça
  , 2012. A PropBank for Portuguese: the CINTIL-PropBank. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pp. 1516–1521.

• Branco, António, Sérgio Castro, João Silva, Francisco Costa
  , 2011. CINTIL DepBank Handbook: Design Options for the Representation of Grammatical Dependencies. Technical Report TR-2011-03, Department of Informatics, University of Lisbon.
• Branco, António, João Silva, Francisco Costa, Sérgio Castro
  , 2011. CINTIL TreeBank Handbook: Design Options for the Representation of Syntactic Constituency. Technical Report TR-2011-02, Department of Informatics, University of Lisbon.

• Branco, António, Francisco Costa, João Silva, Sara Silveira, Sérgio Castro, Mariana Avelãs, Clara Pinto and João Graça
  , 2010. Developing a Deep Linguistic Databank Supporting a Collection of Treebanks: the CINTIL DeepGramBank. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), pp. 1810–1815.
• Silva, João, António Branco and Patricia Nunes
  , 2010. Top-performing Robust Parsing of Portuguese: Freely available in as many ways as you can get it. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), pp. 1960–1963.
• Silva, João, António Branco, Sérgio Castro and Ruben Reis
  , 2010. Out-of-the-Box Robust Parsing of Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR'10), pp. 75–85.

• Branco, António, Francisco Costa, Eduardo Ferreira, Pedro Martins, Filipe Nunes, João Silva and Sara Silveira
  , 2009. LX-Center: A Center of Online Services for Education, Research and Development on Language Science and Technology. In Proceedings of the 1st Iberian SLTech—1st Joint SIG-IL/Microsoft Workshop on Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages.
• Branco, António, Francisco Costa, Eduardo Ferreira, Pedro Martins, Filipe Nunes, João Silva and Sara Silveira
  , 2009. LX-Center: A Center of Online Linguistic Services. In Proceedings of the Demo Session, ACL-IJCNLP 2009.

• Branco, António, Lino Rodrigues, João Silva and Sara Silveira
  , 2008. XisQuê: An Online QA Service for Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR'08). Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) 5190, Springer.
• Branco, António, Lino Rodrigues, João Silva and Sara Silveira
  , 2008. Real-Time Open-Domain QA on the Portuguese Web. In Hector Geffner, Rui Prada, Isabel Machado Alexandre and Nuno David (eds.): Advances in Artificial Intelligence—IBERAMIA 2008, 11th Ibero-American Conference on AI. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) 5290, Springer.
• Branco, António, Francisco Costa, Pedro Martins, Filipe Nunes, João Silva and Sara Silveira
  , 2008. LXService: Web Services of Language Technology for Portuguese. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis and Daniel Tapias (eds.): Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), pp. 2577–2583.

• Silva, João
  , 2007. Shallow Processing of Portuguese: From Sentence Chunking to Nominal Lemmatization. MSc thesis, University of Lisbon. Published as Technical Report DI-FCUL-TR-07-16.
• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2007. Very High Accuracy Rule-Based Nominal Lemmatization with a Minimal Lexicon. In Actas do XXI Encontro Anual da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (APL'07).

• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2006. Dedicated Nominal Featurization of Portuguese. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) 3960, Springer.
• Barreto, Florbela, António Branco, Eduardo Ferreira, Amália Mendes, Maria Fernanda Bacelar Nascimento, Filipe Nunes and João Silva
  , 2006. Open Resources and Tools for the Shallow Processing of Portuguese: The TagShare Project. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'06), pp. 1438–1443.
• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2006. A Suite of Shallow Processing Tools for Portuguese: LX-Suite. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL'06), pp. 179–182.
• Barreto, Florbela, António Branco, Eduardo Ferreira, Amália Mendes, Maria Fernanda Bacelar Nascimento, Filipe Nunes e João Silva
  , 2006. Linguistic Resources and Software for Shallow Processing. In Actas do XXI Encontro Anual da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística de Lisboa (APL'06).

• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2005. Accurate Annotation: an Efficiency Metric. In Nicolas Nicolov, Kalina Bontcheva, Galia Angelova and Ruslan Mitkov (eds.): Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing III, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, ISBN 9027247749, pp. 173–182.

• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2004. Swift Development of State of the Art Taggers for Portuguese. In António Branco, Amália Mendes and Ricardo Ribeiro (eds.): Language Technology for Portuguese: Shallow Processing Tools and Resources, Lisbon, Edições Colibri, pp. 29–45.
• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2004. Evaluating Solutions for the Rapid Development of State-of-the-Art POS Taggers for Portuguese. In Maria Teresa Lino, Maria Francisca Xavier, Fátima Ferreira, Rute Costa and Raquel Silva (eds.): Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'04), pp. 507–510.

• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2003. Portuguese-Specific Issues in the Rapid Development of State of the Art Taggers. In António Branco, Amália Mendes and Ricardo Ribeiro (eds.): Tagging and Shallow Processing of Portuguese: Workshop Notes of TASHA'2003, Lisbon, University of Lisbon, Faculty of Sciences, Department of Informatics, Technical Report TR-2003-28, pp. 7–10.
• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2003. A Metric for the Efficency of Accurate Tagging Procedures. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP'03), Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Borovets, Bulgaria, 10–12 September, ISBN 954-90906-6-3, pp. 71–77.
• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2003. Contractions: Breaking the Tokenization-Tagging Circularity. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) 2721, Berlin, Spinger, ISSN 0302-9743, pp. 167–170.
• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2003. Tokenization of Portuguese: Resolving the Hard Cases. Technical Report TR-2003-4, Departament of Informatics, University of Lisbon.
• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2003. Morpho-syntactic Tagging without Training Corpus or Lexicon: How Far is it Possible to Get? In Amália Mendes and Tiago Freitas (eds.): Actas do XVIII Encontro Anual da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (APL'03), Lisboa, APL, pp. 211–222.

• Branco, António, José Leitão and João Silva
  , 2002. Nexing Corpus: A Corpus of Verbal Protocols on Syllogistic Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02), pp. 397–403.

• Branco, António and João Silva
  , 2001. EtiFac: A Facilitating Tool for Manual Tagging. In Actas do XVII Encontro Anual da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (APL'02), pp. 81–90.

Projects / Funding

• IMPROMPT—Image Alteration with Language Prompts (PI, 2024–)
• Language Driven Image Design with Diffusion (PI, 2023–2024)
• ALBERTINA—Foundation Encoder Model for Portuguese and AI (Co-PI, 2022–2023)
• GPTPT—Transformer-based Decoder for the Portuguese Language (PI, 2022–2023)
• PORTULAN CLARIN—Research Infrastructure for the Science and Technology of Language (member, 2019–)
• ASSET—Intelligent Assistance for Everyone Everywhere (member, 2016–2019)
• DP4LT—Deep Language Engineering for Language Technology (member, 2013–2015)
• QTLeap—Quality Translation with Deep Language Engineering Approaches (member, 2013–2016)
• METANET4U—Enhancing the European Linguistic Infrastructure (member, 2012–2013)
• SemanticShare—Resources and Tools for Semantic Processing (member, 2008–2010)
• QueXting—Question Answering in the Portuguese Web (member, 2005–2007)
• Tagshare—Tagging and Shallow Processing Tools and Resources (member, 2004–2006)
• Nexing—Natural Negation Modeling and Processing (member, 2000–2003)