Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar



Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar is Professor at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC). Since 2004, he is faculty member of the graduate program in linguistics of the Humanities Center, carrying out research and teaching in formal grammar and computational linguistics. He has successfully supervised nine master's theses and four PhD dissertations to completion and has one student and four doctoral students currently under supervision. He is founder and coordinator of the CompLin Research Group on Natural Language and Computation.

Since February 2021, he is a Visiting Professor and Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Applied Mathematics of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in Rio de Janeiro (EMAp/FGV). His postdoctoral research, in collaboration with EMAp’s Professor Alexandre Rademaker, aims at implementing a large-scale linguistic-based computational grammar for Portuguese in the HPSG formalism using the LKB-FOS system. This type of grammar models the structures of a natural language in a mathematically precise manner. It can be used by a parser to produce deep syntactic and semantic analyses of the sentences of the language. These analyses have proven to be extremely valuable in industrial-scale natural language processing applications such as information extraction, question answering, and machine translation.

In 1999 Leonel was awarded a scholarship from the CAPES Foundation to pursue a doctorate in Linguistics at the University of Konstanz in Germany, where he obtained his PhD with honors in 2003. In 2012, as CAPES and DAAD Research Fellow, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Konstanz. In 2013, he developed a computational grammar of Brazilian Portuguese within the LFG/XLE framework during his stay as a Visiting Scientist and CAPES Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Konstanz. From September 2013 to November 2015, he was a Fellow Researcher at the project entitled “Computational Processing of Portuguese for Mobile Devices” of The Group of Computer Networks, Software Engineering and Systems (GREat), hosted by the Computer Science Department of the Federal University of Ceará.

For over 15 years, his main research area has been natural language processing and computational linguistics from a generative grammar perspective. Presently, his focus lies on grammar engineering with HPSG. Past research topics include: generative syntax, corpus linguistics, finite-state morphology, part-of-speech tagging, Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) and Grammatical Framework formalisms.

He has authored or coauthored articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference papers, books, and book chapters, written in Portuguese, English and German. These publications are exhaustively listed in his curriculum vitae at the Lattes Platform of the CAPES Foundation. Many can be downloaded from his profile at Research Gate. The following textbook on computational grammar development within LFG using the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE), a joint work with Christoph Schwarze (University of Konstanz), deserves mention:

For more information on this book, visit:

http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-761.html

http://lfg-book.blogspot.com.br/

A linguist without any formal background in computer science, Leonel is an enthusiast of programming languages. He has created or participated in the creation of diverse tools and resources for the computational processing of Portuguese, French, and Nheengatu (Modern Tupi), a Brazilian indigenous language. He is author of Aelius, a POS-tagging corpus annotation tool for Portuguese. With Alexandre Rademaker, he is one of the main creators and maintainers of MorphoBr, a large-coverage lexical resource for computational morphological analysis of Portuguese.

He has been a program committee member, peer reviewer, and/or editorial board member of diverse linguistic journals and conferences in both linguistics and computer science.