The International Conference on Computational Processing on Portuguese, f- merly the Workshop on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language - PROPOR- is the main event in the area of Natural LanguageProcessing that focusesonPortugueseandthe theoreticalandtechnologicalissuesrelatedto this speci?c language. The meeting has been a very rich forum for the interchange of ideas and partnerships for the researchcommunities dedicated to the automated processing of the Portuguese language. This year's PROPOR, the ?rst one to adopt the International Conference - bel, followedworkshopsheld in Lisbon, Portugal(1993), Curitiba, Brazil(1996), PortoAlegre, Brazil(1998), Evora, Portugal(1999), Atibaia, Brazil(2000), Faro, Portugal (2003) and Itatiaia, Brazil (2006). The constitutionofasteeringcommittee (PROPORCommittee), aninter- tional program committee, the adoption of high-standard refereing procedures and the support of the prestigious ACL and ISCA international associations demonstrate the steady development of the ?eld and of its scienti?c community. A total of 63 papers were submitted to PROPOR 2008. Each submitted paper received a careful, triple-blind review by the program committee or by their commitment. All those who contributed are mentioned on the following pages. The reviewing process led to the selection of 21 regular papers for oral presentation and 16 short papers for poster sessions. The workshop and this book were structured around the following main t- ics: Speech Analysis; Ontologies, Semantics and Anaphora Resolution; Speech Synthesis; Machine Learning Applied to Natural Language Processing; Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing Tools and Applications. Short papers and related posters were organized according to the two main areas of PROPOR: Natural Language Processing and Speech Technology.

The International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese-PROPOR -is the main event in the area of natural language processing that is focused on Portuguese and the theoretical and technological issues related to this language. It w- comes contributions for both written and spoken language processing. The event is hosted in Brazil and in Portugal. The meetings have been held in Lisbon/Portugal (1993), Curitiba/Brazil (1996), Porto Alegre/Brazil (1998), Evora/ Portugal (1999), Atibaia/Brazil (2000), Faro/Portugal (2003), Itatiaia/Brazil (2006) and Aveiro/Portugal (2008). This meeting has been a highly productive forum for the progress of this area and to foster the cooperation among the researchers working on the automated processing of the Portuguese language. PROPOR brings together research groups, promoting the development of methodologies, resources and projects that can be shared among all researchers and practitioners in the field. The ninth edition of this event was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). It had two main tracks: one for language processing and another one for speech processing. This event hosted a special Demonstration Session and the first edition of the PhD and MSc Dissertation Contest, which aimed at recognizing the best academic work on processing of the Portuguese language in the last few years. This edition of the event featured tutorials on statistical machine translation and on speech recognition, as well as invited talks by renowned researchers of natural language processing."