A Design Proposal of an Online Corpus-Driven Dictionary of Portuguese for University Students

Abstract

The objective of this PhD project was to propose the design of an online corpus-driven dictionary of Portuguese for university students (DOPU), aimed at both speakers of Portuguese as a mother tongue and as an additional language and covering Brazilian and European Portuguese varieties. For that, the highly innovative semi-automated approach to dictionary-making (Gantar, Kosem and Krek 2016) was adopted, which involves automatic extraction of data from the corpus and import into dictionary writing system. As a method that had never been applied for lexicographical projects of the Portuguese language, it was necessary to experiment the approach for the first time. Thus, all the required pre-requisites were newly developed, namely, a corpus of academic texts, sketch grammar, GDEX configuration, and a specially-tailored procedure for automatic extraction of data. The experiment indicated that not only can this approach be successfully used as a means to provide lexical content for the design of DOPU, but it can also be beneficial to other lexicographical projects of Portuguese.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) words ‘poverty’ and ‘sustainability’ in the brazilian research

“…We used a multi-disciplinary, electronic corpus of journal articles written in English by Brazilian researchers to search for the two selected search words in this study. The Brazilian Academic Corpus of English -BrACE, was first compiled based on Kuhn (2017) and was used for the analysis of academic collocations used by Brazilian researchers PINTO et al, 2021). Its configuration is shown in BrACE is a multidisciplinary corpus of 906,035 running words which are part of 160 research articles written in English and published in Brazilian peer-reviewed journals.…”

O Corpus de Português Escrito em Periódicos - CoPEP

“…Figura 7 -Cabeçalho com metadados O procedimento meticuloso de compilação de corpus aqui descrito gerou um corpus de trabalho, o CoPEP_1.3, que cumpriu plenamente o propósito de servir de base para a proposta do desenho do DOPU (Kuhn, 2017). Contudo, de forma a tornar público o nosso corpus, decidimos fazer ainda duas pequenas melhorias, tendo sempre em mente que os corpora podem ser continuamente melhorados e que, portanto, é preciso defi nir um limite.…”

“…Embora o CoPEP tenha sido especialmente compilado para a elaboração de um dicionário on-line de português para universitários (Kuhn, 2017), não temos dúvidas de que esse corpus se constitui não apenas em um importante complemento às ofertas existentes de recursos para pesquisas sobre a linguagem acadêmica em português, como também em uma fonte de consulta de qualidade para professores, alunos, linguistas, lexicógrafos e outros interessados pela língua portuguesa. Assim, decidimos disponibilizá-lo publicamente nos programas de análise de corpus Sketch Engine 18 e TEITOK (Janssen 2016).…”

“…O objetivo deste estudo é descrever os desafi os e soluções encontrados na compilação do Corpus de Português Escrito em Periódicos -CoPEP, que contém aproximadamente 40 milhões de palavras, é equilibrado entre as variedades português brasileiro e português europeu em número de palavras e cobre seis grandes áreas de conhecimento. Foi criado para servir como fonte primária para a elaboração do Dicionário On-line de Português para Universitários (doravante, DOPU) 3 (Kuhn, 2017), uma vez constatada a inadequação, para o desenvolvimento 3. Em construção.…”

Portuguese as an additional language for academic purposes: contributions from the academic literacies model to course design

“…Its subsequent analyses JUNG, 2018JUNG, , 2019) also shed light on the issue of creating materials that help develop students' academic literacies considered not as neutral and objective knowledge, but as diverse and historically situated practices. Kuhn (2017) acknowledges the need for research and pedagogical materials to support speakers of Portuguese either as their mother tongue or as an additional language, given the expansion and internationalization of Brazilian higher education and the presence of foreign students in Portugal. Her proposal of a dictionary for university students entailed the construction of a corpus of academic texts in both Brazilian and European Portuguese, which can also foster more research into the lexicogrammatical features of these texts.…”