TugaLex

TugaLex is a lexicon handler and linguistic utility for Portuguese dialects. It provides data on phoneme transcription (IPA), syllable segmentation, and historical and modern orthographic rules.

It gives NLP pipelines and linguistics research a single API for the differences between Portuguese regions and historical spelling agreements.

Supported Dialects

TugaLex maps standard ISO codes to internal regional datasets:

The regional dictionary ships as a slim gzip extract (word, POS, phones, syllables, region) of the unified Portuguese pronunciation lexicon. Regenerate it with python scripts/build_regional_dict.py. Words whose pronunciation does not vary by part of speech carry a single POS-invariant entry that answers every POS query.

Key Features

1. Phonemes & Syllables

Retrieve IPA transcriptions and syllable breaks based on the word's Part-of-Speech (POS) and specific region.

from tugalex import TugaLexicon

lex = TugaLexicon()

# Get both syllables and phonemes
info = lex.get("acordo", pos="NOUN", region="lbx")
# Output: {'syllables': ['a', 'cor', 'do'], 'phonemes': 'ɐˈkoɾdu'}

# POS matters!
verb_phonemes = lex.get_phonemes("acordo", pos="VERB")
# Output: 'ɐˈkɔɾdu'
verb_phonemes = lex.get_phonemes("acordo", pos="NOUN")
# Output: 'ɐˈkoɾdu'

2. Orthographic Agreement (AO1990)

Convert text between pre-agreement and post-agreement (AO1990) spelling for Portugal and Brazil.

• Normalize: Old spelling to modern spelling.
• Reverse: Modern spelling to old regional spelling (PT or BR).

normalized = lex.normalize_ao1900(sentence)

3. Linguistic Insights

TugaLex identifies specific linguistic phenomena programmatically:

• Homographs: Words that change pronunciation based on POS (e.g., sede (thirst) vs sede (headquarters)).
• Archaic Words: Mapping 19th-century etymological spellings to modern ones.
• Silent Letters: Identifying words with silent 'p' or 'c' common before the 1990 agreement.
• Voiced 'u': Detecting words where 'u' is pronounced in 'gue/gui/que/qui' clusters (formerly marked with a trema ü).

4. Noun Gender

Get the grammatical gender of a Portuguese common noun, singular or plural. Suffix rules decide most nouns, and a list of exceptions decides the rest.

TugaLexicon.get_noun_gender("lei")       # 'f'
TugaLexicon.get_noun_gender("dias")      # 'm'
TugaLexicon.get_noun_gender("artista")   # 'mf' (both genders)

Datasets

TugaLex ships the following datasets. Together they contain over 100,000 entries sourced from the Portal da Língua Portuguesa.

• regional_dict.csv: Phoneme and syllable mappings.
• heterophonic_homographs.csv: words pronounced differently depending on postag.
• acordo_ortografico_pt_PT.csv: Portugal old orthographic spellings.
• acordo_ortografico_pt_BR.csv: Brazil old orthographic spellings.
• archaisms.csv: normalized words from before the 20th century.

noun_gender_exceptions.csv.gz lists the nouns whose gender the suffix rules get wrong or do not cover, and the nouns of both genders. scripts/build_noun_gender.py regenerates it from the noun genders of the English Wiktionary.

Install

pip install -e .

TugaLex has no third-party runtime dependencies. All datasets ship inside the package under tugalex/data/.

Related Projects

TugaLex is one piece of the TigreGotico Portuguese NLP stack:

• tugaphone: phonemizes arbitrary Portuguese text across dialects, using TugaLex plus a rule-based fallback.
• tugamorph: rule-based morphological analyzer for Portuguese.
• tugatagger: Part-of-Speech tagging wrapper for Portuguese.
• desacordo_ortografico: detects and converts between Portuguese orthographies, including the AO1990 reform.

License

TugaLex is released under the Apache License 2.0.