Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

141the FrameNet methodology will be used to annotate running text and not onlysentences. The authors intend to use a corpus of legal decisions and explain that thisproject is ―part of a larger project that researches how linguistic information could beused to improve legal information management and legal information retrieval in theBrazilian courts‖ (Bertoldi and Chishman 2012: 2). Apart from the fact that FrameSemantics allows the mapping between syntax and semantics of predications, the otherreason why Bertoldi and Chishman chose to use this theoretical and methodologicalframework lies in the future connection that they wish to implement to other linguisticresources based on frames, such as the Brazilian FrameNet.Even though this is not clearly stated, it seems that the authors want to evaluatethe applicability of the legal frames and tags described in FrameNet to the annotation ofBrazilian legal texts. This leads them to look for the English equivalents of thePortuguese lexical units that occur in the running texts. To accomplish this task, theystate that they refer to their knowledge of the languages in question or to a bilingualdictionary (Bertoldi and Chishman 2012: 6):Considering the verb acusar in Portuguese, an annotator will very easilyidentify to accuse as an English equivalent for acusar. In the next step theannotator can go to the Framenet on-line database to search which semanticframe is evoked by the lexical unit to accuse. The annotator will see that thislexical unit evokes three different frames, Judgment_communication, Judgment,and Notification_of_charges. Analyzing the three frames, the annotator willperceive that only Notification_of_charges is related to the legal domain. Thatis a simple case only to illustrate the manual work of finding equivalents inEnglish for lexical units of a Brazilian legal corpus. After identifying theEnglish equivalent and the evoked frame, the annotator has to verify whetherthe legal event and the frame elements described by that frame arecorrespondent to the Brazilian legal event.They reach the following conclusions. Firstly, they illustrate by means of theframe [Criminal_process] and its subframes that the more complex the event describedby a frame, the more difficult it is to use for semantic annotation in other languages.