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Documents authored by Moura, Pedro

Document
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2026.1
Optimising Retrieval for Linguistic Question-Answering in European Portuguese: A Benchmark on Ciberdúvidas Da Língua Portuguesa

Authors: Pedro Moura, Inês Gama, Fernando Batista, and António Lopes

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 144, 15th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2026)

Abstract
Information retrieval for question-answering remains underexplored in specialised domains and under-resourced language variants such as European Portuguese. Existing benchmarks largely target general-domain English data and document-centric retrieval, failing to capture the semantic alignment required for linguistic consultation tasks over curated question–answer (QA) pairs. We address this gap by introducing a controlled evaluation framework for retrieval over the "Ciberdúvidas da Língua Portuguesa" corpus, comprising 29,145 expert-validated QA entries. Our approach systematically analyses the interaction between indexing strategies, encoder models, and retrieval paradigms, while modelling real-world query variability through a paraphrase-based benchmark of 600 queries across five user profiles, manually validated by a professional linguist to ensure semantic fidelity. Experiments show that dense retrieval with an IR-optimised monolingual encoder significantly outperforms both sparse (BM25) and hybrid methods, achieving a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 0.93. Notably, hybrid retrieval underperforms due to lexical mismatch interference, challenging prevailing assumptions in the literature. Our contributions include a novel benchmark framework for linguistic QA retrieval, empirical evidence supporting monolingual IR-specialised models, and insights into retrieval robustness under paraphrastic variation, enabling improved QA systems for specialised and low-resource environments.
Cite as

Pedro Moura, Inês Gama, Fernando Batista, and António Lopes. Optimising Retrieval for Linguistic Question-Answering in European Portuguese: A Benchmark on Ciberdúvidas Da Língua Portuguesa. In 15th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2026). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 144, pp. 1:1-1:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026)

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@InProceedings{moura_et_al:OASIcs.SLATE.2026.1,
  author =	{Moura, Pedro and Gama, In\^{e}s and Batista, Fernando and Lopes, Ant\'{o}nio},
  title =	{{Optimising Retrieval for Linguistic Question-Answering in European Portuguese: A Benchmark on Ciberd\'{u}vidas Da L{\'\i}ngua Portuguesa}},
  booktitle =	{15th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2026)},
  pages =	{1:1--1:17},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-440-6},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2026},
  volume =	{144},
  editor =	{Batista, Fernando and Ribeiro, Eug\'{e}nio and Ribeiro, Ricardo and Santos, Andr\'{e} L.},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2026.1},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-266997},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2026.1},
  annote =	{Keywords: Information Retrieval, Question-Answering, European Portuguese, Sentence Encoders, Natural Language Processing}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2020.4
BhTSL, Behavior Trees Specification and Processing

Authors: Miguel Oliveira, Pedro Mimoso Silva, Pedro Moura, José João Almeida, and Pedro Rangel Henriques

Published in: OASIcs, Volume 83, 9th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2020)

Abstract
In the context of game development, there is always the need for describing behaviors for various entities, whether NPCs or even the world itself. That need requires a formalism to describe properly such behaviors. As the gaming industry has been growing, many approaches were proposed. First, finite state machines were used and evolved to hierarchical state machines. As that formalism was not enough, a more powerful concept appeared. Instead of using states for describing behaviors, people started to use tasks. This concept was incorporated in behavior trees. This paper focuses in the specification and processing of Behavior Trees. A DSL designed for that purpose will be introduced. It will also be discussed a generator that produces LaTeX diagrams to document the trees, and a Python module to implement the behavior described. Additionally, a simulator will be presented. These achievements will be illustrated using a concrete game as a case study.
Cite as

Miguel Oliveira, Pedro Mimoso Silva, Pedro Moura, José João Almeida, and Pedro Rangel Henriques. BhTSL, Behavior Trees Specification and Processing. In 9th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2020). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 83, pp. 4:1-4:13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)

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@InProceedings{oliveira_et_al:OASIcs.SLATE.2020.4,
  author =	{Oliveira, Miguel and Silva, Pedro Mimoso and Moura, Pedro and Almeida, Jos\'{e} Jo\~{a}o and Henriques, Pedro Rangel},
  title =	{{BhTSL, Behavior Trees Specification and Processing}},
  booktitle =	{9th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2020)},
  pages =	{4:1--4:13},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-165-8},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2020},
  volume =	{83},
  editor =	{Sim\~{o}es, Alberto and Henriques, Pedro Rangel and Queir\'{o}s, Ricardo},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2020.4},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-130174},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2020.4},
  annote =	{Keywords: Game development, Behavior trees (BT), NPC, DSL, Code generation}
}
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