PPG- LETRAS - UFRGS: Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500 - Campus do Vale - Prédio 43221, PPG-LETRAS - Caixa Postal 15002 - CEP 91501-970 - Porto Alegre-RS E-mail: maria.finatto@ufrgs.br (email)
Maria José Bocorny Finatto
Read full resume - Portuguese version=> http://lattes.cnpq.br/0180606646463169
Short Biography
Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul’s (UFRGS), Brazil. Google Latin America Research Awards 2019 winner, for the proposal of “MedSimples”, a textual simplification tool for health-related information
(ufrgs.br/textecc/acessibilidade). Invited collaborator of UFRGS Languages Graduate Program until 2024. CNPq Research Productivity (PQ) fellow since 2007. Coordinator of UFRGS Languages Graduate Program from 2014 to 2015. Member of TERMISUL-UFRGS research group since 1993. Founder of GELCORP-SUL research group (2010). Founder and coordinator of TEXTECC research group (*see below*). Has a PhD in Languages (UFRGS, 2001). Has a postdoctoral degree in Computer Science by the Interinstitutional Nucleus of Computational Linguistics (NILC) at ICMC-USP (2011). CAPES Senior Intern at University of Évora, Portugal, in 2017, on a study on Historical Terminology. Current professor of “Fundamentals of Terminology” and “NLP for linguists” graduate courses at UFRGS, within the area of Lexicography and Terminology. Terminologist responsible for the “Dicionário de Linguística da
Enunciação” (2009). Coordinator and Vice-Coordinator of ANPOLL’s Working Group on Lexicology, Lexicography and Terminology (2006-2010). Developer of online resources for translation students.
Research topics: Textual and Terminological Accessibility in Health Sciences topics (PQ 2017-2020); Corpus Linguistics; Historical/Diachronic Terminology and
Digital Humanities (PQ 2020-2024); Corpus-based Linguistics of Specialized Languages; Natural Language Processing, Lexicology and Lexical Statistics; Lexicography; Textual Studies, Translation and Scientific Enunciation; Textual patterns present in popular written Portuguese (PorPopular Project); and Distance Learning.
*TEXTECC Research Group* - TEXTECC stands for Technical and Scientific Texts. At Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, it is a research group (www.ufrgs.br/textecc) that consists of two associated research projects:
(i) Textual and Terminological Accessibility
(www.ufrgs.br/textecc/acessibilidade); and
(ii) Historical Terminology (www.ufrgs.br/textecc/terminologia).
Our group of researchers conduct studies on different topics related to Health Sciences and linguistic accessibility, including textual and terminological accessibility. We have Computer Science students, linguists, physicians, historians, and philologists within this group. Some of our research projects are funded by CNPq (Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development), by CAPES (Brazilian Coordination of Superior Level Staff Improvement), and by SEAD/UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul’s Distance Learning Department).
In our Textual and Terminological Accessibility project, we are developing an online tool called MedSimples. This tool helps doctors, journalists, and technical writers translate complex medical jargon into an accessible, plain language. This tool deals with three topics so far: Parkinson's disease, Pediatrics and Coronavirus.You can get to know this project better by reading our latest publications, listed below.
MedSimples initiative was supported by Google Latin America Research Awards 2019 (LARA 2019).
Latest publications (english versions)
(1) ZILIO, Leonardo Zilio; LAZZARI, Rafaela Radünz and FINATTO, Maria José Bocorny Finatto. 2024. NLP for historical Portuguese: Analysing 18th-century medical texts. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2024), pages 76–85, Santiago de Compostela, Galicia/Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics. Available at:: https://aclanthology.org/2024.propor-1.8.pdf
ZILIO, L.; FINATTO, M. J. B.; VIEIRA, R.; QUARESMA, P. A Natural Language Processing approach to Complexity Assessment of 18th-century health literature/Uma Abordagem de Processamento de Linguagem Natural para Análise de Complexidade de Literatura Médica do Século XVIII. Domínios de Lingu@gem, Uberlândia, v. 17, p. e1753, 2023. DOI: 10.14393/DLv17a2023-53. Disponível em: https://seer.ufu.br/index.php/dominiosdelinguagem/article/view/69775 . Acesso em: 13 ago. 2024.
Finatto, M. J. B.; Ponomarenko, G. L.; Berwanger, L. P. (2019). It’s not just about reading, it’s about understanding: simplifying texts. Roseta/ABRALIN, v. 2, n. 1, p. 1-10. Available at:
EN: <http://www.roseta.org.br/en/2019/04/05/its-not-just-about-reading-its-about-understanding-simplifying-texts/>
PT: < http://www.roseta.org.br/2019/04/04/nao-basta-ler-tem-que-entender-simplificando-textos/ >.
Zilio, L.; Paraguassu, L. B.; Hercules, L. A. L.; Ponomarenko, G. L; Berwanger, L. P.; Finatto, M. J. B. (2020). A Lexical Simplification Tool for Promoting Health Literacy. In: 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI): Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020), Marselha. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI). Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), v. 1. p. 70-76.
Available at: <readilrec2020.wixsite.com/readi-lrec2020/programme>.
QUARESMA, P. ; FINATTO, MARIA JOSÉ BOCORNY . Information Extraction from historical texts: a Case Study. In: PROPOR Workhsop: Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing, 2020, Évora. DHandNLP2020. Aachen: CEUR- WS, 2020. v. 01. p. 49-56. Available at: https://dblp.org/db/conf/dhandnlp-ws/dhandnlp-ws2020.html
Paraguassu, L. B. ; Zilio, Leonardo ; Hercules, L.A.L. ; Finatto, Maria José Bocorny . MedSimples: an automated simplification tool for promoting health literacy in Brazil⋆. In: Workshop on Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing, 2020, Évora - Portugal. DHandNLP2020 PROPOR Workhsop: Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing. Aachen: CEUR- WS, 2020. v. 1. p. 76-78. Available at: https://dblp.org/db/conf/dhandnlp-ws/dhandnlp-ws2020.html
Finatto, Maria José Bocorny; Goncalves, M. F.; Quaresma, P. Portuguese Corpora of the 18th century: old Medicine texts for teaching and research activities. In: Conference on Language Technologies & Digital Humanities, 2018, Ljubljana. Proceedings of the Conference on Language Technologies & Digital Humanities 2018. Ljubljana, Eslovênia: Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts, 2018. v. 01. p. 114-120.
Finatto, Maria José B.; Vale, O. A.; Laporte, E. Recognizing the vocabulary of brazilian popular newspapers with a free-access computational dictionary. ALFA: REVISTA DE LINGUÍSTICA (UNESP. ONLINE), v. 63, p. 63-80, 2019. Available at: https://periodicos.fclar.unesp.br/alfa/article/view/11234/8178