Vinicius F. Caridá

Enzo S. N. Silva, Pablo B. Costa, Raphael C. Vlasman et al.

High-quality corpora are essential for advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Portuguese. Building on previous encoder-only models such as BERTimbau and Albertina PT-BR, we introduce NorBERTo, a modern encoder based on the ModernBERT architecture, featuring long-context support and efficient attention mechanisms. NorBERTo is trained on Aurora-PT, a newly curated Brazilian Portuguese corpus comprising 331 billion GPT-2 tokens collected from diverse web sources and existing multilingual datasets. We systematically benchmark NorBERTo against Strong baselines on semantic similarity, textual entailment and classification tasks using standardized datasets such as ASSIN 2 and PLUE. On PLUE, NorBERTo-large achieves the best results among the encoder models we evaluated, notably reaching 0.9191 F1 on MRPC and 0.7689 accuracy on RTE. On ASSIN 2, NorBERTo-large attains the highest entailment F1 (~0.904) among all encoders considered, although Albertina-900M and BERTimbau-large still hold an advantage. To the best of our knowledge, Aurora-PT is currently the largest openly available monolingual Portuguese corpus, surpassing previous resources. NorBERTo provides a modern, mid-sized encoder designed for realistic deployment scenarios: it is straight-forward to fine-tune, efficient to serve, and well suited as a backbone for retrieval-augmented generation and other downstream Portuguese NLP systems.

Paulo Finardi, Wanderley M. Melo, Edgard D. Medeiros Neto et al.

Scarcity of domain-specific data in the Portuguese financial domain has disfavored the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. To address this limitation, the present study advocates for the utilization of synthetic data generated through data augmentation techniques. The investigation focuses on the augmentation of a dataset sourced from the Central Bank of Brazil FAQ, employing techniques that vary in semantic similarity. Supervised and unsupervised tasks are conducted to evaluate the impact of augmented data on both low and high semantic similarity scenarios. Additionally, the resultant dataset will be publicly disseminated on the Hugging Face Datasets platform, thereby enhancing accessibility and fostering broader engagement within the NLP research community.

Paulo Finardi, José Dié Viegas, Gustavo T. Ferreira et al.

In the last few years, three major topics received increased interest: deep learning, NLP and conversational agents. Bringing these three topics together to create an amazing digital customer experience and indeed deploy in production and solve real-world problems is something innovative and disruptive. We introduce a new Portuguese financial domain language representation model called BERTaú. BERTaú is an uncased BERT-base trained from scratch with data from the Itaú virtual assistant chatbot solution. Our novel contribution is that BERTaú pretrained language model requires less data, reached state-of-the-art performance in three NLP tasks, and generates a smaller and lighter model that makes the deployment feasible. We developed three tasks to validate our model: information retrieval with Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) from Itaú bank, sentiment analysis from our virtual assistant data, and a NER solution. All proposed tasks are real-world solutions in production on our environment and the usage of a specialist model proved to be effective when compared to Google BERT multilingual and the DPRQuestionEncoder from Facebook, available at Hugging Face. The BERTaú improves the performance in 22% of FAQ Retrieval MRR metric, 2.1% in Sentiment Analysis F1 score, 4.4% in NER F1 score and can also represent the same sequence in up to 66% fewer tokens when compared to "shelf models".

Amir Jalilifard, Vinicius F. Caridá, Alex F. Mansano et al.

Keyword extraction has received an increasing attention as an important research topic which can lead to have advancements in diverse applications such as document context categorization, text indexing and document classification. In this paper we propose STF-IDF, a novel semantic method based on TF-IDF, for scoring word importance of informal documents in a corpus. A set of nearly four million documents from health-care social media was collected and was trained in order to draw semantic model and to find the word embeddings. Then, the features of semantic space were utilized to rearrange the original TF-IDF scores through an iterative solution so as to improve the moderate performance of this algorithm on informal texts. After testing the proposed method with 200 randomly chosen documents, our method managed to decrease the TF-IDF mean error rate by a factor of 50% and reaching the mean error of 13.7%, as opposed to 27.2% of the original TF-IDF.