The LexALP Corpus contains approximately 3000 documents that discipline or directly affect the fields of spatial planning and sustainable development in the nine different legal systems under analysis.
The documents relevant for this collection of texts in electronic format were retrieved mostly from legal databases available on the Internet for the different systems and selected by legal experts on the basis of a set of criteria identified for the specific needs of the project:
- relevance to the specific areas identified by Alpine Convention (in particular article 9 of the Protocol on 'Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development')
- primary sources of the law for every system at national and international level, i.e. normative texts only (laws, codes, etc.)
- latest amendments and versions of all legislation (at time of collection: June - August 2005)
- entire documents (no single paragraphs or excerpts)
- terminological relevance (legally relevant legislation containing only lists of numbers, place names etc. are excluded from selection, due to the lack of relevant terminology and the desire not to burden the corpus with data of limited use).
The collected documents were classified according to the LexALP structure for corpus and term bank and semi-automatically tagged according to criteria such as language, legal system, legal text type, title, abbreviation as well as subdivided into paragraphs, sections and sentences. Semi-automatic alignment was furthermore carried out on all multilingual documents selected for the corpus (Alpine Convention and its Protocols, EU legislation, international treaties as well as Swiss legislation).
Thanks to such detailed classification and tagging of textual data, the LexALP Corpus, which adopts the bistro corpus component as an interface, can implement advanced search for terms, phraseology and translation equivalents for all legal languages under analysis.