| Sumario: | As a result of litigation over the past decade, major tobacco companies were compelled to make public a broad range of previously confidential documents. We have created a series of corpora from the tobacco industry documents (TIDs) for three purposes: (1) to establish baseline descriptions of various linguistic features of this unique set of texts; (2) to identify TIDs in which rhetorical manipulation ("deception") may have occurred and to estimate the extent and prevalence of manipulation; (3) to analyze manipulation in order to classify it and develop means to identify similar manipulation in other industry document sets. Our three-part corpus creation strategy employed rigorous sampling methods. First, we drew a limited sample from the largest collection of TIDs, to determine a representative classification of text types and to estimate their proportions within the overall body of texts. Then, we created a reference corpus (500,000+ words) constituting a stratified random sample of all TIDs, whether or not they exhibit manipulation. Finally, we compiled a corpus of texts presumed to exhibit rhetorical manipulation. We assumed that multiple drafts of a text or versions of a text prepared for different audiences constituted rhetorical manipulation. This article presents our experience with the sampling methods utilized in this corpus-building process and our findings regarding text types comprising the reference corpus.
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