Objectives

• The EAGLES descriptive standards proposal is made for the construction of a lexical resource, thought of as being multifunctional, but not for a given application resource or for a given range of applications. This has to be kept in mind in discussions about generalization devices, about the use of hierarchical or other types of structures superposed onto the EAGLES descriptions, questions of redundancy or elimination of redundancy, and so on. This is also related with questions of the formal representation of proposals which will be the output of EAGLES work.
• The experience acquired in the different projects dealing with lexical knowledge modelling has shown that it is not realistic to expect the same degree of consensus for all levels of linguistic description. Typically, while arguments about orthography and morphology rest on well established linguistic facts, arguments on semantics rest on theories for which no experimentation has been extensive enough to make sure that the descriptive devices used are already defined on the basis of sufficient uncontroversial facts. For this reason, the methodology applied to each level should be adjusted to the kind of results that it is likely to produce.
  The levels of linguistic description for which it is most realistic to come up with proposals for descriptive guidelines in the short or medium term should be considered with more emphasis than the other ones; morphology and morphosyntax are among these levels, see the revised workplan for that matter.
• It is not relevant to determine priorities on languages to define standards for. The project will concentrate on overall features for the languages of the EEC, while the possibility of representing other languages - Swedish, for example - should not be excluded.
  A comprehensive description of lexical features for all european languages is a long task which would entail the participation of a specialist of each language in each task dealing with each linguistic level. The EAGLES objective is neither to provide such a comprehensive description nor to concentrate on specific languages. Such language-oriented studies may lead to unsatisfactory results such as, for example, a well developed morphology in German and French and very little in English and Spanish while syntax would be completed only in French and Italian according to the expertize available in each Task Group.
• A core-extensions approach should be applied in order to quickly bring out a first consensus and prepare the next steps. Ideally the construction of proposals for guidelines for individual linguistic levels should be spiral-wise, in the sense of making available a first draft as soon as possible, getting feedback, amending and improving the proposal, circulating it again, etc.
  

  For the other levels, the work of the EAGLES lexicon group should lead to a survey of the available approaches, as well as to a methodology of comparing these proposals. Making such a methodology available and testing it on a relevant subset of phenomena and approaches is a goal in itself. A starting point may be work in the EUROTRA-7 Study and in the NERC project.
  

The goals should be discussed by the participants to the task groups and quickly decided for at the very beginning of the task work. Here follows a proposal for goals for each task. This proposal is a general framework within which each task will fix its own limits according to the input material provided by a survey of available proposals.

• Architecture: core linguistic model, definition of the lexical levels and their relations.
• Orthography: core of consensus features and comparison of specific extensions (to be clarified later),
• Phonology: information needed by NLP applications,
• Morphosyntax: core of consensus features and comparison of specific extensions,
• Syntax: core of consensus features and comparison of specific extensions (to be clarified later),
• Semantics: aspects identified where steps towards consensus building can most realistically be taken; directions for future work,
• Multilingualism: state of the art connected to the results of the other levels (to be clarified later),
• Terminology: state of the art connected to the results of the other levels (to be clarified later).