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Multilingual Corpus for Terminology Work: The LexALP Corpus of Legal Texts
• text type: legal texts
Experts for each legal system selected the latest versions and amendments of legal texts
relevant to spatial planning and sustainable development at the time of corpus collection
(summer 2005). As these issues are regulated at different levels, also the collected documents
represent different levels of legislation: for instance, whereas landscape protection issues
are regulated at the level of the single Länder in Austria, in France such strong delegation
of competences is not implemented. As a consequence, the Austrian corpus section contains
no federal legislation while the French section is composed only of French national law
codes.
Table 1 shows the number of documents for each legal system. In addition, the legal levels
regional (R), national (N) and supranational (SUP), which all documents are classifi ed by, are
specifi ed. The three hierarchical levels are not represented equally among the different legal
systems. As explained above, this is due to the fact that different legal systems exhibit a
different intrinsic organisation.
legal
system
number
of docs
levels10 R+N N
AT CH DE FR IT SI Alp. Conv. INT EU total
612 119 62 612 490 213 40 149 795 3092
N+R
(Bavaria) N
N+R
N SUP SUP SUP
(Friuli V. G.)
10 Table 1: Distribution of corpus documents over legal systems
Altogether, the number of texts collected amounts to 3,095 and comprises in total 18,597,942
words in four languages and for 9 legal systems.
3. Corpus architecture
In the same way in which the content of a corpus has to be selected carefully (see section
2), decisions on corpus architecture are highly infl uenced by the requirements of terminology
work. Language material employed in terminology retrieval and analysis has to account for
transparency of its origin, type and status. It has to be guaranteed that the (usually large
amounts of) data can be searched exhaustively and that all information is accessible in a
structured manner. Next to working with sentence-like text units (as provided by keyword in
context searches, so-called KWIC searches) the opportunity to also look at a wider context or
to even go back to the original full text document should be given to the terminologist at any
point. Whenever multilingual versions of one document are available, it is desirable to allow
for parallel searches in two or more languages.
To comply with these demands the corpus is annotated in different ways.
3.1. Levels of annotation
Currently the LexALP corpus implements two levels of annotation: meta information for each
document and information about text structure. The sets of meta data hold information for
every single document, e.g. the title or passing date of the law. This information facilitates
correct citation and thus answers for scientifi c reliability of data. Furthermore, it allows for
retrieval of documents at a later date. In addition, each document is classifi ed in respect to a
10 R = regional/Länder level, N = national/Bund level, SUP = supranational level
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