Guest Editors:
- Renata Vieira University of Évora
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2449-5477 - Aline Marins Paes Carvalho Fluminense Federal University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9089-7303
- Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes University of São Paulo https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2776-6140
- Helena de Medeiros Caseli Federal University of São Carlos https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3996-8599
Foreword:
We are delighted to present this special issue of the Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society dedicated to Language Models in Portuguese. The recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) has profoundly transformed the way we interact with information, create content, and develop intelligent applications. However, much of this progress has been concentrated in languages with ample data and resource availability, highlighting the need for initiatives focused on languages with less technological coverage, such as Portuguese.
Portuguese is currently the fifth most spoken language in the world, present on multiple continents and cultural contexts, and represents a fertile field for artificial intelligence research. The challenge of building, evaluating, and applying robust language models for Portuguese involves not only technical aspects, such as corpora availability, efficient architectures, and evaluation metrics, but also social, ethical, and cultural dimensions.
This special issue brings together articles that explore different perspectives on the topic, including:
- Comparative and critical analyses of language models
- Social, ethical, financial, and ecological issues related to language models
- Discussion of alternative solutions for language models
- Domain-specific language models
- Suitability of narrow language models for specific tasks
- Multilingual vs. Portuguese-specific models
- Semantic issues in language models
- Cultural issues in language models
- Resources for training language models
- Language model evaluation
By bringing together contributions from researchers from Brazil and abroad, this edition seeks to strengthen the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community in Portuguese, foster collaborations, and highlight scientific advances that position the Portuguese language as a key player in the era of language models.
We thank the authors who submitted their papers, the reviewers for their thoughtful and generous efforts, and the scientific community that has been mobilizing to consolidate this emerging field. We are convinced that the articles published here will contribute not only to academic advancement but also to the development of more inclusive, sustainable, and culturally sensitive technologies.
