Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language PDF
Preview Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language
Lecture 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 Thisworkissubjecttocopyright.Allrightsarereserved,whetherthewholeorpartofthematerialis concerned,specificallytherightsoftranslation,reprinting,re-useofillustrations,recitation,broadcasting, reproductiononmicrofilmsorinanyotherway,andstorageindatabanks.Duplicationofthispublication orpartsthereofispermittedonlyundertheprovisionsoftheGermanCopyrightLawofSeptember9,1965, initscurrentversion,andpermissionforusemustalwaysbeobtainedfromSpringer.Violationsareliable toprosecutionundertheGermanCopyrightLaw. springer.com ©Springer-VerlagBerlinHeidelberg2010 PrintedinGermany Typesetting:Camera-readybyauthor,dataconversionbyScientificPublishingServices,Chennai,India Printedonacid-freepaper 06/3180 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
The list of books you might like
