Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Plurilinguismo in Europa ... - EURAC

Elena Chiocchetti, Verena Lyding
set of subfi elds of the subjects under analysis (see fi gure 1). Structural annotation adds markers
to explicitly codify text structure, such as sentence and paragraph boundaries or likewise
preamble, annex or title information.
Table 2 lists a number of categories adopted for structural annotation and meta data
information.
META INFORMATION • title of the document
• abbreviation
• offi cial passing date
• in Offi cial Journal (number, date)
• legal system
• legal hierarchy (e.g. regional or
national legislation)
• language
• translation status (e.g. original or
translated version)
• belonging to subfi eld (see fi gure 1 for full
list of subfi elds)
STRUCTURAL INFORMATION simple structural segments:
• sentence
• textual paragraph
structural segments with content related
information about segment type:
• title
• preamble, annex, …
• legal paragraph
• chapter
510
Table 2: Meta data categories and categories of structural annotation
Another important level of annotation is the alignment of multilingual documents. In
multilingual versions of one legal text the sentences corresponding to each other are associated
to allow for multilingual searches in parallel texts. Though not yet realised for the LexALP
corpus, the fi rst step would be to align sentences and subsequently go down to align phrases or
sentence fragments and even words, where possible.
3.2. Representation and storage of corpus data
3.2.1. Character encoding
The corpus documents are collected as raw text fi les. Due to the differing character sets
commonly used to encode Slovene documents (ISO 8859-2/Latin-2) and documents in Italian,
German and French (ISO-8859-1/Latin1) 11 all texts are converted to the overarching UTF-8
(UNICODE) 12 encoding.
11 For a description of the ISO-8859 charsets see http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html
12 http://www.unicode.org
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