Research Areas
Frame Semantics
Construction Grammar
Natural Language Understanding
Machine Translation
Multimodal Computational Semantics
Collaborators
I'm the PI of the FrameNet Brasil Computational Linguistics Lab at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Brazil, where I've been leading, together with Ely Matos, a team of about 20 people interested in developing a FrameNet for Brazilian Portuguese (FrameNet Brasil) and cognitively inspired applications for Natural Language Understanding based on it. Currently, those applications include LUTMA, a collaborative frame-building tool, a Constructional Analyzer using Relations Among Multiple Attribute-Value Matrices (CARMA) and a Multilingual Knowledge Base (m.knob) for Tourism. I'm also one of the enthusiasts for the Global FrameNet initiative.
I've received my PhD in Linguistics in 2009 from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, working with Professor Maria Luiza Braga on the relation between inheritance and change using a model to account for the diachronic reorganization of Construction Networks due to the convergence of new patterns into families of constructions. During my PhD, I spent one semester in Berkeley at the Linguistics Department of the University of California, under the supervision of Professor Eve Sweetser. Since then, I've been coming back to Bay Area very frequently due to intensive collaboration with the Berkeley FrameNet folks in several projects, the latest being the Multilingual FrameNet initiative, which has been using the FrameNet Brasil WebTool for an experiment of joint annotation of full texts in several languages.
I've also been collaborating with Ben Lyngfelt and Lars Borin, from the University of Gothenburg, in an effort for contrasting and aligning constructions in Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish. Additionally, our lab got funded to develop collaborative research on contrastive Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar for Machine Translation with the groups led by Alexander Ziem, from the University of Dusseldorf, and Oliver Czulo, from the University of Leipzig.
More recently, I’ve been working with Mark Turner in the study of generative AI as a tool for linguistic research, as well as in the cognitive foundations of scenario forecasting and futurism.
In 2010, I joined the Faculty of Letters and the Graduate Program in Linguistics at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, where I teach both undergraduate and graduate division courses on Cognitive Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Historical Linguistics.
Personal
I like to travel, despite all the bad luck that usually follows me wherever I choose to go. (Seriously, some time ago I was supposed to spend one week at a gorgeous resort in a semi-desert island and it was consumed by a huge fire prior to my arrival. The plane in which I was traveling from Havana to Panama City was hit by the storm preceding a hurricane. It shook so hard I felt like I was one of the characters of the TV series Lost.) I also like to cook for my wife and kids. No bad luck there.