In my post last month, 120’2026 (2026-04-01) , I foresaw that this month of May 2026 would also bring quite a few events that would make me a very proud father.
First in chronological order is an international language congress, named LREC 2026, which was held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, during the second full week of the month. You may remember that in an earlier post, 304’2019 (2019-10-31) , I showed my daughter Karina and her colleague João presenting a project named “Linguistic improvements on the text-image aligner LinkPICS”. And this time, Karina and her colleague Aline presented a paper named Meta4XNLI-ptBR: Brazilian Portuguese Extension of Meta4XNLI Corpus. It is the first corpus that deals with NLP processing of Brazilian Portuguese metaphores. See also reference #1 below. The following photos were taken during LREC 2026 on 131’2026 and 133’2026 (2026-05-11–13).
Photos taken during LREC 2026 in Palma de Mallorca on 131’2026 and 133’2026 (2026-11-13–15), with Karina Johansson on both photos, and together with Aline Paes presenting their paper during LREC 2026.
Today’s header photo shows Lake Zurich in Switzerland. On her way back from Mallorca to Brazil, Karina stopped over in Zurich to visit friends and go on a sight-seeing. She also took the following photos. More about Zurich can be found in reference #2 below.
Pictures from Zurich, Switzerland, taken on 137’2026 (2026-05-18) by Karina Mayumi Johansson
But wait, here comes more interesting facts from May! On 142’2026 (2026-05-22), Karina defended her master’s thesis in Data Science. Below are two photos from that event. My congratulations to her and her mentor, Helena Caseli, for eight tough but really fruitful years!
Photos taken on 142’2026 (2026-05-22) during the presentation of the Master’s thesis “Automated Metaphor Detection in Brazilian Portuguese” by Karina Johansson, together with the three jurors, from left to right Heloisa de Arruda Camargo, Helena de Medeiros Caseli, and Ivandré Paraboni (online).
During the month of October, my daughter Karina had the pleasure of presenting a project related to NLP (Natural Language Processing) at an international conference for AI (Artificial Intelligence) in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
While still being a Portuguese colony, during the 16th century, São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, or just Salvador for short, became the first capital of Brazil, before it later on moved to Rio de Janeiro and Brasília. Here are some nice pictures from Salvador. See also reference # 1 below.
The sun sets in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Photo taken from Morro do Cristo da Barra by Karina Johansson on 2019-10-18.Six different views of Salvador. Upper row from left to right: Monument of the fallen cross in the historical center, statue raised in 1999; Karina joined the legendary author Jorge Amado, his wife Zélia Gattai and their dog Fadul on this park bench in Rio Vermelho. Lower row from left to right: The district of Pelourinho in the historical center; The Lacerda elevator, the world’s first urban elevator from 1873, connecting upper and lower parts of Salvador; A view from the Ibis hotel in Rio Vermelho; The Museum of modern art (MAM), inaugurated in 1963, with one building going back to the 16th century. All photos were taken on 2019-10-17–20.
Update 2019-11-04
Today I received more details from the conference I mentioned above. It was called STIL – XII Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology and was held in Salvador on 2019-10-15–18, bringing together both academic and industrial participants working in the areas of Linguistics, Computer Science, Psycholinguistics, Information Science, etc.
STIL also had three different collocated events, one of them being VI Student Workshop on Information and Human Language Technology (TILic). It was at TILic that Karina presented her project, Research of the use of word embeddings for calculation of similarity in translation memories, with the following abstract:
“The strategy traditionally employed by the CAT tools to match the segments of the phrase being currently translated with the segments present in the translation memory considers the intersection of the sequence of words (n-grams) present in the segments of the text being compared. However, this strategy is not capable of capturing semantic similarities beyond the trivial level. This study therefore presents a project with the aim of investigating the applicability of monolingual and bilingual word embeddings to implement the matching. The study is still in its initial phase of development. In sequence, there will be proposed and implemented a strategy for the calculation of similarity using word embeddings, which will be incorporated in a open source CAT tool. In order to evaluate the proposed strategies, the quality of matching in the baseline system (a version of a CAT system without any modification) will be compared to those of the system in which the proposed method will be implemented. At the conclusion of this project is expected to have obtained a strategy based on semantic similarity that will be an alternative to the traditional matching strategy based on n-grams. Although there are already texts covering the use of word embeddings to detect the textual similarity and cleaning of translation memories, there is no literature about any work that has investigated the objective of this project. Consequently, this study should be considered as the first initiative to an investigation within this context.”
In ref. # 2 below is the complete presentation (in Portuguese).
And here are three photos from the event. It shows Karina and her colleague João Gabriel Melo Barbirato, who presented a project named “Linguistic improvements on the text-image aligner LinkPICS”.
João Gabriel Melo Barbirato and Karina Mayumi Johansson presenting their projects at TILic19 on 2019-10-17.
What did you learn in School today? 