Speech Analysis -- Event Detection by HMM, SVM and ANN: A Comparative Study -- Frication and Voicing Classification -- A Spoken Dialog System Speech Interface Based on a Microphone Array -- Ontologies, Semantics and Anaphora Resolution -- PAPEL: A Dictionary-Based Lexical Ontology for Portuguese -- Comparing Window and Syntax Based Strategies for Semantic Extraction -- The Mitkov Algorithm for Anaphora Resolution in Portuguese -- Semantic Similarity, Ontologies and the Portuguese Language: A Close Look at the subject -- Speech Synthesis -- Boundary Refining Aiming at Speech Synthesis Applications -- Evolutionary-Based Design of a Brazilian Portuguese Recording Script for a Concatenative Synthesis System -- DIXI - A Generic Text-to-Speech System for European Portuguese -- European Portuguese Articulatory Based Text-to-Speech: First Results -- Machine Learning Applied to Natural Language Processing -- Statistical Machine Translation of Broadcast News from Spanish to Portuguese -- Combining Multiple Features for Automatic Text Summarization through Machine Learning -- Some Experiments on Clustering Similar Sentences of Texts in Portuguese -- Portuguese Part-of-Speech Tagging Using Entropy Guided Transformation Learning -- Learning Coreference Resolution for Portuguese Texts -- Speech Recognition and Applications -- Domain Adaptation of a Broadcast News Transcription System for the Portuguese Parliament -- Automatic Classification and Transcription of Telephone Speech in Radio Broadcast Data -- A Platform of Distributed Speech Recognition for the European Portuguese Language -- Natural Language Processing Tools and Applications -- Supporting e-Learning with Language Technology for Portuguese -- ParaMT: A Paraphraser for Machine Translation -- POSTERS -- Second HAREM: New Challenges and Old Wisdom.-Floresta Sintá(c)tica: Bigger, Thicker and Easier -- The Identification and Description of Frozen Prepositional Phrases through a Corpus-Oriented Study -- CorrefSum: Referencial Cohesion Recovery in Extractive Summaries -- Answering Portuguese Questions -- XisQuê: An Online QA Service for Portuguese -- Using Semantic Prototypes for Discourse Status Classification -- Using System Expectations to Manage User Interactions -- Adaptive Modeling and High Quality Spectral Estimation for Speech Enhancement -- On the Voiceless Aspirated Stops in Brazilian Portuguese -- Comparison of Phonetic Segmentation Tools for European Portuguese -- Spoltech and OGI-22 Baseline Systems for Speech Recognition in Brazilian Portuguese -- Development of a Speech Recognizer with the Tecnovoz Database -- Dynamic Language Modeling for the European Portuguese -- An Approach to Natural Language Equation Reading in Digital Talking Books -- Topic Segmentation in a Media Watch System.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, PROPOR 2008, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in September 2008. The 21 revised full papers and 16 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on speech analysis; ontologies, semantics and anaphora resolution; speech synthesis; machine learning applied to natural language processing; speech recognition and applications; natural language processing tools and applications; posters.