Nuno J. Mamede - Böcker

Since 1993, PROPOR Workshops have become an important forum for - searchers involved in the Computational Processing of Portuguese,both written and spoken. This PROPOR Workshop follows previous workshops held in 1993 (Lisbon, Portugal), 1996 (Curitiba, Brazil), 1998 (Porto Alegre, Brazil), 1999 ´ (Evora, Portugal), 2000 (Atibaia, Brazil) and 2003 (Faro, Portugal). The wo- shop has increasingly contributed to bringing 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 development of the ?eld and of its scienti?c community. In 2006 PROPOR received 56 paper submissions from 11 di?erent countries: Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Norway, USA, Italy, Japan, France, Canada, Denmark and the UK, from which 9 are represented in the accepted papers. Each submitted paper underwent a careful, triple-blind review by the P- gram Committee. All those who contributed are mentioned in the following pages. The reviewing process led to the selection of 20 regular papers for oral presentation and 17 short papers for poster sections, which are published in this volume. The workshop and this book were structured around the following main t- ics, seven for full papers: (i) automatic summarization; (ii) resources; (iii) au- matic translation; (iv) named entity recognition; (v) tools and frameworks; (vi) systems and models; and another ?ve topics for short papers; (vii) information extraction; (viii) speech processing; (ix) lexicon; (x) morpho-syntactic studies; (xi) web, corpus and evaluation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, PROPOR 2003, held in Faro, Portugal in June 2003. The 24 revised full papers and 17 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on speech analysis and recognition; speech synthesis; pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax, and the lexicon; tools, resources, and applications; dialogue systems; summarization and information extraction; and evaluation.

PorTAL - Portugal for Natural Language Processing - follows two previous c- ferences: FracTAL, held at the Universit'e de Franche-Comt'e, Besan,con (France), in December 1997, and VexTAL, held at Venice International University, C'aF- cari (Italy), in November 1999. The main goals of theses conferences have been: (i) to bring together the NLP community in Europe; (ii) to strengthen the po- tion of local NLP research in the international NLP community; (iii) to provide a friendly forumfor discussion of new research and applications. PorTAL has recon?rmed this year the goals and the high international sta- ing of those conferences, largely due to its Program Committee, composed of renowned researchers in the ?eld of Natural Language Processing, a third of themfromPortuguese universities. This clearly contributed to the signi?cant number of papers submitted (48) by researchers from 12 di?erent countries. Each paper submitted was reviewed by three reviewers, either from the P- gram Committee or by their commitment. All those who contributed are m- tioned on the following pages.The review process led to the selection of 35 papers for oral presentation: 23 regular papers and 11 short papers. They have been published in this volume.