This paper presents the alignment of verbal predicate constructions with the clitic pronoun "lhe" in the European (EP) and Brazilian (BP) varieties of Portuguese, such as in the sentences "Já lhe} arrumaram a bagagem" | "Sua bagagem está seguramente guardada" 'His baggage is safely stowed away', where the EP dative proclisis "lhe" contrasts with the BP possessive pronoun "sua". We have selected several different paraphrastic contrasts, such as proclisis and enclisis, clitic pronouns co-occurring with relative pronouns and negation-type adverbs, among other constructions to illustrate the linguistic phenomenon. Some differences correspond to real contrasts between the two Portuguese varieties, while others purely represent stylistic choices. The contrasting variants were manually aligned in order to constitute a gold standard dataset, and a typology has been established to be further enlarged and made publicly available. The paraphrastic alignments were performed in the e-PACT corpus using the CLUE-Aligner tool. The research work was developed in the framework of the eSPERTo project.

1. technology
from seed
EP–BP Paraphrastic Alignments
Verbal Predicate Constructions
with the Clitic Pronoun lhe⋆
Ida Rebelo-Arnold, Anabela Barreiro & Paulo Quaresma
POP@PROPOR 2018 – Canela, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil – September 23th 2018
Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores
Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Lisboa
Laboratório de Sistemas de Língua Falada

2. • Goal: overview of the use of clitic lhe in the European (EP)
and Brazilian (BP) varieties of Portuguese
• Methodology: apply linguistic and computational knowledge
in the alignment of pairs of paraphrastic units between EP-BP
• Approach:
– discuss different semantico-syntactic behaviors of lhe in constructions
found in the corpus
– define a typology for the different uses of lhe
• Corpus: occurrences of lhe represent EN-EP and EN-BP
translations of the same fiction novels by David Lodge
Portuguese Clitics
How Are They Handled in Translation?
2

3. • The Portuguese clitic with only one syntactic function – Dative
(DAT) – in any phrase
– Other clitics may assume other semantic roles in the phrase
– This explains the amount of other clitics registered in Table 1 (ahead)
• There is an ongoing variation pattern in BP that allows its use
in different positions w.r.t. the verb, when compared to EP
• This variation in BP admits the replacement by Nominative
(NOM) or Accusative (ACC) complements keeping the original
meaning
• Need to better understand and describe lhe in order to build a
variety adaptation module useful for different applications
(examples ahead)
Why the Clitic lhe?
3

4. • A set of paraphrastic variants between EP and BP resulting
from a previous alignment research task has been described to
be used in a paraphrasing system [3]
• A high quality paraphrasing system (whith the ambition to
include a variety adaptation module to deal with cultural,
linguistic and stylistic differences between varieties) requires
a large dataset of paraphrastic contrasts among the distinct
varieties of the Portuguese language
• Such large amount of paraphrastic resources does not exist yet
for the Portuguese language
From a Computational Perspective
4

5. • To capture paraphrastic contrasts in corpora is very important
and the occurrence of linguistic phenomena in texts is
indispensable for wide-coverage and an efficient variety
adaptation process
• An automatic conversion of texts from one variety into another
represents an important function in paraphrasing systems
• Resources resulting from a linguistic knowledge-based
alignment task can be useful for other applications
From a Computational Perspective
5
– Language learning
– Summarization
– Question-answering
– Dialogue
– Plagiarism detection
– Text authoring and revision
– Machine translation
– Among others

6. EP
• preferably enclisis
Mabel entregou-lhe as chaves da sala
BP
• preferably proclisis
Mabel lhe passou as chaves da sala
From a Linguistic Perspective
6
EP selects a proclitic clitic after adverbials or the relative pronoun que, when BP
may find other solutions:
EN - it had never happened to him
EP - nunca tal lhe acontecera [V–PRODAT (PROCL) ANTEC−ADVnunca]
BP - isso nunca tinha acontecido com ele [V–PREP PRONOM]
EN - listened to what he took, at the time, to be a very funny parody
EP - ouvira o que lhe pareceu ser uma paródia muito divertida - [V–PRODAT (PROCL) ANTEC−QUE]
BP - ouviu o que parecia ser [ ] uma paródia muito engraçada - [V-PROθ]

7. EP
• avoids nominative personal
pronouns with accusative/
dative value
BP
• accepts nominative personal
pronouns with accusative/
dative value
From a Linguistic Perspective
7
EN - it had never happened to him
EP - nunca tal lhe acontecera [V–PRODAT (PROCL) ANTEC−ADVnunca]
BP - isso nunca tinha acontecido com ele [V–PREP PRONOM]

8. EP
• generalized dative clitics as
possessives
BP
• dative clitics as possessives
are quite uncommon in
standard written and spoken
language
From a Linguistic Perspective
8
EN with which she prepared his breakfasts
EP com que lhe preparava os pequenos-almoços [V–PRODAT (PROCL) ANTEC−QUE]
BP com que preparava o seu café da manhã [V-ART+POSS+NP]

9. Statistic Results
9

10. Just as a sample:
• The results for the Enclitic and Proclitic use of lhe for each
variety confirm the statements in the Linguistic Perspective
about clitic placement
– preferably Enclisis in EP – [EP - 131 Enclisis vs 105 Proclisis]
– preferably Proclisis in BP – [BP – 49 Proclisis vs 18 Enclisis]
• The systematic BP avoidance of the Dative (DAT) is reinforced
by the significant amount of the Accusative (ACC) direct object
pronouns o/a in comparison with the dative lhe results [179
vs 67]
Statistic Results from Table 1
10

11. Typology of lhe Constructions in the Corpus
11

12. 1. Categories that apply to the clitic:
• Vcomp: type of Verb complement
• PL: placement of the Verb complement – Proclisis (before VP)
or Enclisis (after VP)
• Ant: existence of an antecedent (Adverbial or Relative QUE)
that selects Proclisis
2. Categories that apply to paraphrase identity:
• Lex: Lexical
• Sem: Semantical
• Syn: Syntactical
It may fully apply (+), partially apply or not apply (-)
Typology of lhe Constructions in the Corpus
12

13. DAT vs NONE
33%
DAT vs POSS
17%DAT vs DAT
10%
DAT vs ACC
10%
NONE vs DAT
12%
DAT vs APPROX
PARAPHRASES
12%
DAT vs PREP+NOMIN
PRON
6%
EP vs BP
Typology in Numbers
13

14. • Half of the examples illustrate a non-clitic solution
in BP for the use of DAT in EP - DAT vs none and
DAT vs poss
The two other types that display a clitic solution in
BP, are DAT vs ACC and DAT vs PREP+NOMIN
PRON, showing, once again, the BP avoidance of lhe
• The generalized use of lhe as possessive in EP
seems, also, rejected in BP
Typology in Numbers
14

15. • All considerations above added to the small amount
of coincident use of lhe, in both varieties, expressed
by DAT vs DAT – 9 over 90 examples – reinforce
the relevance of creating a variety adaptation tool
for the various uses we mention in this work
• 2 types are not included in Table 2 because they
refer to very idiosyncratic examples in the corpus:
– None (ø) vs DAT
– DAT vs Approximate Paraphrase
Typology in Numbers
15

16. Local Grammar
16
• Allows converting an EP predicate verbal construction – clitic
after adverbial or relative pronoun que "that” – into an equivalent
BP construction, where the clitic was elided, as:
não lhe disse que ... > Você não contou que ... ‘you haven’t told him (that) …’
• Allows the most common conversion between enclisis and
proclisis as:
entregou-lhe as chaves > lhe passou as chaves ‘hand over the key’

17. Application in eSPERTo
17
Results of the application of the previously illustrated transformational grammar
in the eSPERTo paraphrasing systems in the function EP > BP adaptation
Adaptation capability within eSPERTo, where a sentence
written in EP can be transformed into a sentence written
in BP with the suggestions provided by the system

18. • When used in MT (or paraphrasing) systems, alignments
containing linguistic knowledge contribute to:
– improved accuracy
– reduced computational complexity and ambiguity
– improved translation/paraphrasing quality
• Clitics are a very frequent phenomenon in Portuguese, thus
the results that can be obtained through their correct
alignment in a system can be significantly better than those
obtained in a purely statistic or ad-hoc manner
Final Remarks
18

19. • Many other linguistic phenomena require further examination
• Without a suitable linguistic approach to the alignment task,
and limited to the capacity of the algorithms, systems will
continue to be overloaded with poor quality alignments,
which will create translation (paraphrasing) of limited
quality, requiring a greater post-editing effort
• There is still a shortage of manually annotated alignments
that can be used in training and evaluation for many language
pairs or language variants, especially those with scarce
resources
Final Remarks
19

20. • We have used a methodology to align EP and BP paraphrases
• The proposed alignment methodology is independent of the
application, so the pairs of aligned paraphrases can be used in
translation, paraphrasing, variety adaptation and other
NLP tasks
• Knowledge learned from a linguistic approach to alignment
tasks can help solve problems related to align variant
paraphrases where clitics are involved, leading to more
precise and better quality applications
Final Remarks
20

21. 1. Bagno, M.: Português ou Brasileiro: um convite à pesquisa. Parábola, São Paulo, Brasil (2001)
2. Barreiro, A., Mota, C.: e-PACT: eSPERTo Paraphrase Aligned Corpus of EN-EP/BP Trans- lations. Tradução em Revista 1(22), 87–102 (2017)
3. Barreiro, A., Mota, C.: Paraphrastic Variance between European and Brazilian Portuguese. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on NLP for
Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, VarDial@COLING 2018, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA (2018)
4. Barreiro, A., Raposo, F., Luís, T.: CLUE-Aligner: An Alignment Tool to Annotate Pairs of Paraphrastic and Translation Units. In: Calzolari, N.,
Choukri, K., Declerck, T., Goggi, S., Grobelnik, M., Maegaard, B., Mariani, J., Mazo, H., Moreno, A., Odijk, J., Piperidis, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the
10th Edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. pp. 7–13. LREC 2016, European Language Resources Association (2016)
5. Carreras,X.,Chao,I.:Freeling:Anopen-sourcesuiteoflanguageanalyzers.In:Proceedings of the Forth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
LREC 2014, Lisbon, Portugal (2004)
6. Castilho,A.:NovaGramáticadoPortuguêsBrasileiro.Contexto(2010)
7. Castilho, A.: O português do Brasil. In: Ilari, R. (ed.) Linguística Românica. pp. 237–269. Fundamentos 83, Ática (2011)
8. Castro,I.:Introduçaoàhistóriadoportuguês.Colibri,Lisboa,Portugal(2011)
9. Costa, J., Grolla, E.: Pronomes, clíticos e objetos nulos: dados de produção e compreensão. In: Aquisição de língua materna e não materna:
questões gerais e dados do português. pp. 177–199. Language Science Press, Berlin, Germany (2017)
10. Cunha,C.,Cintra,L.:NovaGramáticadoPortuguêsContemporâneo.NovaFronteira(1985)
11. Frankenberg-Garcia,A.,Santos,D.:IntroducingCOMPARA:thePortuguese-EnglishParallel Corpus. In: Zanettin, F., Bernardini, S., Stewart, D. (eds.)
Corpora in Translator Education, pp. 71–87. St. Jerome, Manchester (2003)
12. Kato, M., Martins, A.M.: European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese: an overview on word order. In: The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics.
pp. 15–40. Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ (2016)
13. Neves,M.H.M.:Gramáticadeusosdoportuguês.Unesp(2000)
14. Pacheco, C., Scher, A.: As construções médias do português do Brasil sob a perspectiva teórica da Morfologia Distribuída. São Paulo, Brasil (2008)
15. Pereira, S., Juliá, T.: Estudio contrastivo del régimen verbal en el Portugués de Brasil y el Español Peninsular. Ph.D. thesis, Universidade de
Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, España (2007)
16. Perini, M.A.: Modern Portuguese: a Reference Grammar. Yale Language Series, Yale University (2002)
17. Santos,D.:Ospossessivosestão-meacomplicaroensino;-)um estudo do dativo possessivo baseado em corpos. Linguística : Revista de Estudos
Linguísticos da Universidade do Porto 10, 107–130 (2015)
18. Taboada, M.V.C.: La arquitectura de la gramática: los clíticos pronominales románicos y eslavos. Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain (2006)
References
21

22. 22
Thank you!
Obrigada!