YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

MEETING OF THE COUNCIL WORKING PARTY
ON LEGAL DATA PROCESSING
Both tools aim at supporting the user and both tackle certain language issues
related to the database.
2.1. The Eurovoc thesaurus
the irst edition of the Eurovoc thesaurus dates back to 1984. today this
controlled vocabulary is available in version 4.2 in 18 oficial languages (exceptions
are maltese and Estonian) and comes with approximately 6 400 descriptors,
an almost equivalent number of reciprocal hierarchical relationships (broader–
narrower term) and around 3 500 reciprocal associative relations (related term).
the added value that this tool provides for EUR-Lex users cannot immediately
be derived from these purely statistical igures. But queries based on natural
language search terms already come with certain weaknesses when applied
to a monolingual database. Cases of homonymy and synonymy can be referred
to as blurring the results of that kind of query. Nevertheless, quite a few users
tend to perform this kind of search irst — and sometimes only this kind.
the natural language search term ‘electricity’ was
found in the title of 573 documents (EN advanced search
query [tI=electricity]). for comparison, in the Italian language
version of the database, the search in the title for
the synonyms ‘corrente elletrica’ AND ‘elletricità’, combined
with a Boolean OR, produced only 278 hits (It
advanced search query [tI=corrente elletrica OR
tI=elletricità]) and applying ‘Strom’ OR ‘Elektrizität’ in
the German language (DE advanced search query
[tI=Strom OR tI=Elektrizität]) gathers only 149 references. One reason for the
comparably low number of hits in the German example is the availability of
numerous composites in the German language which are not retrieved by that
example of a query.
Consulting the Eurovoc thesaurus results, for all ive terms that were used
for the above queries, in only one common descriptor, which is ‘electrical energy’
in English, ‘energia elettrica’ in Italian and the corresponding ‘elektrische
Energie’ in German. the terms previously used for the search in the title all
serve as non-descriptors in the controlled vocabulary and provide a reference
to the descriptor.
Applying the descriptor for a search exploiting the Eurovoc ield in the
EUR-Lex database (e.g. [DC=electrical energy]) results, for all the three language
versions mentioned, in the same number of hits (which was 1 123).
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