Table Of ContentLecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 6036
EditedbyR.Goebel,J.Siekmann,andW.Wahlster
Subseries of Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Enrico Francesconi Simonetta Montemagni
Wim Peters Daniela Tiscornia (Eds.)
Semantic Processing
of Legal Texts
Where the Language of Law
Meets the Law of Language
1 3
SeriesEditors
RandyGoebel,UniversityofAlberta,Edmonton,Canada
JörgSiekmann,UniversityofSaarland,Saarbrücken,Germany
WolfgangWahlster,DFKIandUniversityofSaarland,Saarbrücken,Germany
VolumeEditors
EnricoFrancesconi
DanielaTiscornia
InstituteofLegalInformation,TheoryandTechniques,ITTIG-CNR
ViadeiBarucci20,50127Florence,Italy
E-mail:{francesconi,tiscornia}@ittig.cnr.it
SimonettaMontemagni
IstitutodiLinguisticaComputazionale"AntonioZampolli"(ILC)-CNR
AreadellaRicercadiPisa,ViaMoruzzi1,56124Pisa,Italy
E-mail:[email protected]
WimPeters
UniversityofSheffield,DepartmentofComputerScience
RegentCourt,211PortobelloStreet,SheffieldS14DP,UK
E-mail:[email protected]
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2010295554
CRSubjectClassification(1998):I.2,H.3,H.4,H.2.8,H.2,J.1
LNCSSublibrary:SL7–ArtificialIntelligence
ISSN 0302-9743
ISBN-10 3-642-12836-XSpringerBerlinHeidelbergNewYork
ISBN-13 978-3-642-12836-3SpringerBerlinHeidelbergNewYork
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Preface
ThelegaldomainrepresentsaprimarycandidateforWeb-basedinformationdis-
tribution,exchangeandmanagement,astestifiedbythenumerouse-government,
e-justice and e-democracy initiatives worldwide. The last few years have seen a
growing body of research and practice in the field of artificial intelligence and
law addressing aspects such as automated legal reasoning and argumentation,
semanticandcross-languagelegalinformationretrieval,documentclassification,
legal drafting, legal knowledge discovery and extraction. Many efforts have also
been devotedto the constructionoflegalontologiesandtheir applicationto the
law domain.
A number of different workshops and conferences have been organized on
these topics in the framework of the artificial intelligence and law community:
amongthem, the ICAIL (InternationalConferenceon ArtificialIntelligence and
Law) and the Jurix (International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Infor-
mation Systems) conferences; several workshops on legal ontologies have been
held by the AI&Law Association (LOAIT) and by the Legal XML Community
(LegalXMLWorkshopsandLegalXMLSummerSchool).Inalltheseevents,the
topicsoflanguageresourcesandhumanlanguagetechnologiesreceiveincreasing
attention.
The situation is quite different within the computational linguistics commu-
nity, where little attention has been paid to the legal domain besides a few
isolatedcontributionsand/orprojectsfocussingonthe processingoflegaltexts.
In this context, the editors of this book organized a Workshop on “Semantic
Processing of Legal Texts,” which was held in Marrakech (Morocco) in 2008,
in the framework of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources
and Evaluation (LREC–2008). The workshopoffered the possibility for the two
communities to meet, exchange information, compare perspectives and share
experiences and concerns on the topic of legal knowledge extraction and man-
agement.Both researchcommunities canbenefit from this interaction:the legal
artificial intelligence community can gain insight into state–of–the–art linguis-
tic technologies, tools and resources, and the computational linguists can take
advantage of the large and often multilingual legal resources – corpora as well
as lexicons and ontologies – for training and evaluation of current Natural Lan-
guageProcessing(NLP)technologiesandtools.Themainfocusoftheworkshop
was the automatic extraction of relevant information from legal texts and the
structured organization of this extracted knowledge for legal knowledge repre-
sentation and scholarly activity, with particular emphasis on the crucial role
played by language resources and human language technologies.
The number of received submissions, the variety of perspectives and ap-
proaches witnessed by the accepted papers, the number and variety of partic-
ipants from 17 different countries all over the world, both from the academic
VI Preface
and industrial communities and with different (i.e., legal, linguistic as well as
computational) backgrounds, as well as the stimulating discussion both speak-
ers and attendees engaged in during the workshop indicate this as a promising
field, whichcombines legalinformatics andnaturallanguageprocessingininno-
vative andproductiveways.This factpersuadedus to investsome time to wrap
up the current debate in a book including the revised and expanded versions
of selected papers presented at the workshop which were complemented with
invited contributions of leading researchers and groups eminently active in the
field.
The present volume is thus the outcome of this joint effort, coveringsome of
themainissuesincurrentresearchonsemanticprocessingoflegaltexts,aswellas
providingnewexcitingavenuesfortheyearstocome.Thepapersreportresearch
from the academic and industrial communities, from different countries dealing
with different languages,including less–resourcedones,and all together provide
anarticulatedpictureofthecurrentachievementsandchallengesinthefield.We
areawarethatseveralbookshavebeenpublishedinthelegalartificialintelligence
community on topics such as legal standards and legal ontologies1. Up to now,
however, no comprehensive overview of the field of semantic processing of legal
textsexists,combiningviewsandperspectivesfromthecomputationallinguistic
and legal communities. The volume intends to fill this gap, by enabling readers
togaininsightintostate–of–the–artNLPtechnologies,toolsandtheavailability
of legal resources,in the form of corpora,lexicons and ontologies.In particular,
we hope that it will be seminal for the future integration of NLP techniques
into recently established approaches to legal analysis such as formal ontology
design and acquisition, and contrastive analysis of legal systems. In the book
the challengesofthe fieldaretackledfromdifferentperspectives,thus providing
the reader with an overview of the current debate.
The book is organized into thematic sections, each covering core topics ad-
dressing, from different perspectives, the complex relation between legal text
and legal knowledge. The boundaries of these sections are of course not strict,
but delineate general aspects of thematic segmentation.
Part 1, “Legal Text Processing and Information Extraction,” focuses on the
analysis of legal texts through a variety of NLP techniques, with a specific view
toinformationextractiontasks.Thefirstpaperofthissection,byVenturi,inves-
tigates the peculiarities of legal language with respect to ordinary language for
1 Benjamins R., Casanovas P., Gangemi A. (eds.), Law and the Semantic Web,
Springer, 2005; Ajani G.M., Peruginelli G., Sartor G. and Tiscornia D. (eds.), The
multilingual Complexity of European Law, European Press Academic Publishing,
2006; Biagioli C., Francesconi E., Sartor G. (eds.), Proceedings of the V Leg-
islative XML Workshop, European Press Academic Publishing, 2007; Francesconi
E.,Technologies for European Integration, European Press Academic Publishing,
2007; Breuker J., Casanovas P., Klein M., Francesconi E. (eds.), Law, Ontologies
and the Semantic Web, IOS Press 2008; Casanovas P., Sartor G., Casellas N., Ru-
bino R.(eds.), Computable Models of theLaw, LNAI4884, Spinger2008.
Preface VII
both Italianand Englishas a basic prerequisite for the developmentof domain–
specific knowledge management applications. The second and third papers, re-
spectively, by Dozier et al. and by Quaresma and Gon¸calves, deal with a basic
but still challenging annotation task, i.e., the recognition and classification of
legal entities (namely, named entities) mentioned in legal texts. The paper by
Wyner et al. closes the section with a survey of recent text–mining approaches
used to automatically profile and extract arguments from legal cases.
Part 2, “Legal Text Processing and Construction of Knowledge Resources,”
illustrates the challenges NLP faces and its achievements in a bootstrapping
approach to formal ontology design and construction, based on the integration
of ontological and textual resources. In particular, the first paper by Pala et
al. illustrates the results of experiments aimed at bootstrapping an electronic
dictionary of Czech law terms from texts. The second contribution of this sec-
tion, by Francesconiet al.,presents a methodology for multilingual legalknowl-
edgeacquisitionandmodellingencompassingtwocomplementarystrategies;two
case-studies combining bottom–up and top-down methodologies for knowledge
modelling and learning are presented. The third paper by Bosca and Dini illus-
trates an ontology induction experiment for individual laws (the Italian “Legge
Bassanini” in the case at hand) based on corpora comparison that exploits a
domain corpus automatically generated from the Web. In a different vein, the
contribution by Ajani et al. illustrates new features recently introduced in the
LegalTaxonomySyllabus(LTS),atoolforbuildingmultilingualconceptualdic-
tionariesfortheEUlaw,totackletheproblemofrepresentingtheinterpretation
of terms besides the definitions occurring in the directives, the problem of nor-
mative change, and the process of planning legal reforms of European law.
Part 3, “Legal Text Processing and Semantic Indexing, Summarization and
Translation,”coversaselectionoftasksandapplicationswhichcanbenefitfrom
NLP–based functionalities, including legal document indexing (Schweighofer),
classification(cfr. de Maat and Winkels; Loza Menc´ıa and Fu¨rnkranz),summa-
rization (Chieze et al.) and translation (Ogawa et al.).
We hope that this example–based overview of semantic processing of legal
texts will provide a unique opportunity for researchers operating in the field to
gain insight into this active and challenging research area, where the language
of law meets the law of language.
We would like to thank all contributing authors,for their enthusiasm,vision
and stamina. Last but not least, we intend to express our sincere gratitude to
all reviewers for their insightful contributions.
March 2010 Enrico Francesconi
Simonetta Montemagni
Wim Peters
Daniela Tiscornia
Organization
Referees
Dani`ele Bourcier Humboldt Universit¨at, Berlin, Germany
Paul Bourgine CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France
Joost Breuker Leibniz Center for Law, University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Pompeu Casanovas InstitutdeDretiTecnologia,UAB,Barcelona,
Spain
Alessandro Lenci Dipartimento di Linguistica, Universita` di
Pisa, Italy
Leonardo Lesmo Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita` di
Torino, Turin, Italy
Manfred Pinkal Department of Computational Linguistics,
Saarland University, Germany
Vito Pirrelli Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of
CNR, Pisa, Italy
Paulo Quaresma Universidade de E´vora,Portugal
Erich Schweighofer Universita¨t Wien, Rechtswissenschaftliche
Fakulta¨t, Vienna, Austria
Tom van Engers Leibniz Center for Law, University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Maria A. Wimmer Institute for Information Systems, Koblenz
University, Germany
Radboud Winkels Leibniz Center for Law, University of
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Table of Contents
PART I – Legal Text Processing and Information
Extraction
Legal Language and Legal Knowledge Management Applications....... 3
Giulia Venturi
Named Entity Recognition and Resolution in Legal Text .............. 27
Christopher Dozier, Ravikumar Kondadadi, Marc Light,
Arun Vachher, Sriharsha Veeramachaneni, and Ramdev Wudali
Using Linguistic Information and Machine Learning Techniques to
Identify Entities from Juridical Documents.......................... 44
Paulo Quaresma and Teresa Gonc¸alves
Approaches to Text Mining Arguments from Legal Cases.............. 60
Adam Wyner, Raquel Mochales-Palau, Marie-Francine Moens, and
David Milward
PART II – Legal Text Processing and Construction
of Knowledge Resources
Automatic Identification of Legal Terms in Czech Law Texts .......... 83
Karel Pala, Pavel Rychl´y, and Pavel Sˇmerk
Integrating a Bottom–Up and Top–Down Methodology for Building
Semantic Resources for the Multilingual Legal Domain ............... 95
Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Wim Peters, and
Daniela Tiscornia
Ontology Based Law Discovery .................................... 122
Alessio Bosca and Luca Dini
Multilevel Legal Ontologies........................................ 136
Gianmaria Ajani, Guido Boella, Leonardo Lesmo, Marco Martin,
Alessandro Mazzei, Daniele P. Radicioni, and Piercarlo Rossi
PART III – Legal Text Processing and Semantic
Indexing, Summarization and
Translation
Semantic Indexing of Legal Documents ............................. 157
Erich Schweighofer
XII Table of Contents
Automated Classification of Norms in Sources of Law................. 170
Emile de Maat and Radboud Winkels
Efficient Multilabel Classification Algorithms for Large-Scale Problems
in the Legal Domain ............................................. 192
Eneldo Loza Menc´ıa and Johannes Fu¨rnkranz
An Automatic System for Summarization and Information Extraction
of Legal Information.............................................. 216
Emmanuel Chieze, Atefeh Farzindar, and Guy Lapalme
Evaluation Metrics for Consistent Translation of Japanese Legal
Sentences ....................................................... 235
Yasuhiro Ogawa, Kazuhiro Imai, and Katsuhiko Toyama
Author Index.................................................. 249
