Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

101content from the perspective of the Formal or Logic Semantics, Lexical Semantics,Grammatical Semantics and Pragmatics heading for the construction of an ontology‖(Alves et al. 2007: 93). This means that the linguistic analysis that they perform onverbs combines several but intertwined theoretical frameworks.The authors use a corpus of electronic documents available in the legal databasesof the Instituto das Tecnologias de Informação na Justiça of Portugal (Institute ofInformation Technologies in Justice). In order to extract verb terms they use a toolcalled XTRACTOR. They, then, select the most frequent verbs and proceed to analyzetheir concordances so as to select for each verb the following pieces of information(Alves et al. 2007: 93):1) a definition,2) its logic-semantic relations,3) its semantic roles,4) its frame elements.According to them, the definition is useful for the people working with theontology but not for the system itself. The logic-semantic relations are selected based onthe relations proposed by WordNet, i.e. antonymy, entailment, cause, hyponymy andsynonymy. Take the verb condenar (to condemn) as an example. The procedure toanalyze its logic-semantic relationships proceeds as follows. Firstly, they refer to Borba(2002) for whom this verb can convey two types of situations: action-process andaction. They consider the situation of ―action-process‖ (meaning declarar culpado(Eng. to declare guilty) and pronunciar uma sentença (Eng. to pronounce a sentenceupon)) as relevant in the subject field in question. Then, they use WordNet‘s logicsemanticrelations to account for the relations between the verb condenar and otherverbs (Figure 14). For instance, condenar has three synonyms, i.e. pronunciar