Papers by João Alves
TOWER+: Bridging Generality and Translation Specialization in Multilingual LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Ricardo Rei, Nuno M Guerreiro, José Pombal, João Alves, Amin Farajian, Pedro Teixeirinha, Andre Martins
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as the de facto solution for multilingual machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a suite of LLMs that can be fine-tuned to deliver strong performance on translation and multilingual general-purpose text capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models on translation and general-purpose tasks. |
Steering Large Language Models for Machine Translation with Finetuning and In-Context Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Duarte Alves, Nuno Guerreiro, João Alves, José Pombal, Ricardo Rei, José de Souza, Pierre Colombo, Andre Martins
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are a promising avenue for machine translation (MT) however, their effectiveness depends on the choice of few-shot examples and they often require extra post-processing due to overgeneration. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates few-shot examples during finetuning to improve performance on MT tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms few-shot prompting while eliminating the need for in-context examples. |
AIA-BDE: A Corpus of FAQs in Portuguese and their Variations (2020.lrec-1)
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Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira, João Ferreira, José Santos, Pedro Fialho, Ricardo Rodrigues, Luisa Coheur, Ana Alves
| Challenge: | a corpus of 380 domain-oriented FAQs in Portuguese is presented . paraphrases or entailed questions are created manually, by humans, or automatically, with Google Translate. |
| Approach: | They present a corpus of 380 domain-oriented FAQs in Portuguese and their variations, i.e., paraphrases or entailed questions, created manually, by humans, or automatically, with Google Translate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms other systems in the domain of question-answering . it performs well when matching variations with their original questions . |