Macau, China, April 20, 2026 (Lusa) - The University of Evora (UE) has successfully developed Portuguese-language Artificial Intelligence (AI) models that achieve performance levels comparable to those of global tech giants, Professor Paulo Quaresma told Lusa on Monday.
The researcher, who is currently in Macau for a seminar at the University of Saint Joseph (USJ), said that the Alentejo region institution’s strategy focused on creating smaller, more efficient models specifically tailored to the Portuguese language and its variants.
A language model is an artificial intelligence system trained to understand, process and generate human language.
"We have managed to show that models much smaller than those of large US companies, which incur enormous production costs, can achieve results of the same standard in certain tasks," he told Lusa.
According to the lecturer from the Computer Science Department at the UE, the results of this research were made available in open-source models and could be used by other universities and companies.
One recent example of this collaboration is the development of a model that combines Portuguese and Galician.
"This model, built jointly, is available and being adopted by companies.”
“Combining these two languages of common origin turns out to be better than each one individually," he said.
Regarding technical challenges, the expert identified data curation as the main obstacle.
He said that simply collecting vast amounts of text from the internet was insufficient, saying it was vital to filter and ensure the linguistic quality and factual accuracy of the content used for training.
The professor's visit to Macau is also intended to strengthen academic ties with the USJ, an institution with which the UE has collaboration agreements.
He said that the goal was to extend this partnership to the field of language models and to recruit PhD students for joint research projects between Portugal and the Chinese Special Administrative Region.
“We cooperate with USJ in supervising PhD students, but this is an opportunity to extend our work to the field of language models and attract new researchers who wish to work with us,” he said.
Last year, the Macau Telecommunications Company (CTM) announced plans to develop a Portuguese-language AI language model capable of translating audio and video, generating reports and performing customer service functions.
NCM/MYAL // AYLS
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