TBA
Alcides Fonseca
LASIGE, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa
Abstract
TBA
Short Bio
Alcides Fonseca is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Alcides has a PhD, a MSc and a BSc from the University of Coimbra. His research covers the intersection of Machine Learning and Programming Languages, having build several programming languages and related tools, namely with liquid types and genetic programming. Apart from research, Alcides has been a consultant for several startups (Dragonboat, Genomed, SmashTech, Sentilant, Spero, Burocratik) and multinational companies (Ogilvy & Mather).
AMALIA: An Open Source Large Language Model for European Portuguese
João Magalhães
NOVA LINCS, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Abstract
Despite rapid progress in open large language models (LLMs), European Portuguese (pt-PT) remains underrepresented in both training data and native evaluation, with machine-translated benchmarks likely missing the variant's linguistic and cultural nuances. We introduce AMALIA, a fully open LLM that prioritizes pt-PT by using more high-quality pt-PT data during both the mid- and post-training stages. To evaluate pt-PT more faithfully, we release a suite of pt-PT benchmarks that includes translated standard tasks and four new datasets targeting pt-PT generation, linguistic competence, and pt-PT/pt-BR bias. Experiments show that AMALIA matches strong baselines on translated benchmarks while substantially improving performance on pt-PT-specific evaluations, supporting the case for targeted training and native benchmarking for European Portuguese.
Short Bio
Prof. João Miguel da Costa Magalhães is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and a senior researcher at NOVA LINCS. He serves as co-Director of the CMU Portugal Program and leads the NOVA LINCS Multimodal Systems Group. He holds a PhD from Imperial College London (2008) and his research focuses on vision-language models, multimodal learning, and AI systems for semantic multimedia. João has coordinated and contributed to international projects with R&D leading partners BBC, Amazon and Google. He is the Technical Program Committee Chair of the 2026 ACM International Conference in Multimedia and in 2022 was the General Chair.
