Identifying equivalents of specialized verbs in a bilingual comparable corpus of judgments: A frame-based methodology

Janine Pimentel


Abstract
Multilingual terminological resources do not always include the equivalents of specialized verbs that occur in legal texts. This study aims to bridge that gap by proposing a methodology to assign the equivalents of this kind of predicative units. We use a comparable corpus of judgments produced by the Supreme Court of Canada and by the Supremo Tribunal de Justiça de Portugal. From this corpus, 200 English and Portuguese verbs are selected. The description of the verbs is based on the theory of Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1977, 1977, 1982, 1985) as well as on the FrameNet methodology (Ruppenhofer et al. 2010). Specialized verbs are said to evoke a semantic frame, a sort of conceptual scenario in which a number of mandatory elements play specific roles (e.g. the role of judge, the role of defendant). Given that semantic frames are language independent to a fair degree (Boas 2005; Baker 2009), the labels attributed to each of the 76 identified frames (e.g. [Crime], [Regulations]) were used to group together 165 pairs of candidate equivalents. 71% of them are full equivalents, whereas 29% are only partial equivalents.
Anthology ID:
L12-1095
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1791–1798
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/245_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Janine Pimentel. 2012. Identifying equivalents of specialized verbs in a bilingual comparable corpus of judgments: A frame-based methodology. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 1791–1798, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Identifying equivalents of specialized verbs in a bilingual comparable corpus of judgments: A frame-based methodology (Pimentel, LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/245_Paper.pdf