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Jorge Proença, Dirce Celorico, Carla Lopes and Fernando Perdigão from the Signal Processing Lab of IT in Coimbra, together with Miguel Sales Dias, Michael Tjalve, Andreas Stolcke and Sara Candeias from Microsoft, were awarded the "Camões Prize 2016 for the Technologies for the Portuguese Language" for the best paper of PROPOR 2016 - International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese. The paper is entitled "Design and Analysis of a Database to Evaluate Children’s Reading Aloud Performance".

In the context of the LetsRead project (IT internal project) and Jorge's PhD, the developed work is about the automatic evaluation of reading aloud performance of children using Speech Recognition technologies, more precisely about the design of reading tasks and which performance metrics can be extracted. A prototype application showing the automatic methods to compute an overall reading performance score has also been developed and presented at the conference.

Jorge Proença accepted the prize in behalf of the team and appreciated the recognition of this work by the scientific community of the computational processing of the Portuguese language.