Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

1784.1.4.5. ContentAs mentioned, the topic of the texts was identified on the basis of the indexing terms fromthe identification section of the documents. According to the criteria set out in the EaglesReport (1996) on text typology, corpus texts used in this research can be said to be―reflexive‖, i.e. the texts talk about themselves and propose their own classification.Although the existence of the indexing terms does not constitute incontestable evidence ofthe accuracy of the classification, ―for the control of large corpora there is no practicalalternative‖ (EAGLES 1996: 8). The comparison of Appendices 2 and 4 suggests, however,that the Portuguese subcorpus and the Canadian subcorpus do have some themes incommon: ―Criminal law‖, ―rights‖, ―evidence‖, ―duties‖, ―appeals‖, ―negligence‖, etc.Chapter 5 provides more information on the content of the texts, as the frames observedprovide clues to common themes across texts.4.2. Bottom-up workflowThis sub-chapter presents a methodology for describing specialized verbs and for assigningtheir equivalents. In contrast to the top-down approach adopted by FrameNetlexicographers (cf. Chapter 3), the approach described here is bottom-up, i.e. verbs are firstselected, analyzed and then organized in frames (Figure 24). The following sectionsdescribe each stage of the methodology: the extraction of candidate terms for each language(section 4.2.1), the validation of the candidate terms (section 4.2.2), the description of terms(sections 4.2.3 - 4.2.5), the identification of frames grouping terms together (section 4.2.6),data encoding (section 4.2.7), the annotation of contexts (section 4.2.8), the validation ofdata (section 4.2.9), and the assignment of equivalents (section 4.2.10). Even if these stepsare described separately, in the course of the analysis, some are intertwined or superimposeon each other.