Introduction

This task is meant to provide methodological guidelines for building the consensus. Its role is to define the objectives and methods for the other tasks and to specify the means of communicating the results of the Working Group inside each task and to the outside.

An important aim of this task is to define the scope of the EAGLES standardization entreprise for the Lexicon Working Group, its limits in width and depth, viz.:

• exhaustive description vs. basic consensus features
• all languages vs. a restricted list of languages
• empirical observations vs. application/theory-oriented approaches
• redundancy vs. non-redundancy
• etc.

The answers to these questions determine the overall orientation of the different tasks and the basis for an evaluation framework. In order to perform the necessary tasks of circulation and integratability checking of the work done at each linguistic level, the methodology group should be active over the whole period of the EAGLES exercice. This report consists of three parts: Objectives, basis for comparison and presentation of the results.