Lesmo, Mazzei, Palmirani, and Radicioni on an NLP System for Extracting Legal Modificatory Provisions

Professor Dr. Monica Palmirani of Università di Bologna Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche «Antonio Cicu» and CIRSFID, and Professor Dr. Leonardo Lesmo, Dr. Alessandro Mazzei, and Dr. Daniele P. Radicioni, all of Universita’ di Torino Dipartimento di Informatica, have published TULSI: an NLP system for extracting legal modificatory provisions, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law.

Here is the abstract:

In this work we present the TULSI system (so named after Turin University Legal Semantic Interpreter), a system to produce automatic annotations of normative documents through the extraction of modificatory provisions. TULSI relies on a deep syntactic analysis and a shallow semantic interpreter that are illustrated in detail. We report the results of an experimental evaluation of the system and discuss them, also suggesting future directions for further improvement.

Appleby: Toward Automating Complex Legislation Updates

Paul Appleby of TSO has posted Toward Automating Complex Legislation Updates, on TSO’s OpenUp blog.

In this post, Mr. Appleby describes TSO‘s recent work for the UK National Archives, respecting “updating the system for consolidation of legislation,” which involves Legislation.gov.uk.

For this project, TSO is using its Data Enrichment Service (DES) technology. Mr. Appleby explains that “the DES provides a platform to execute GATE pipelines. A GATE pipeline is a series of processing steps, with each step doing something to the text, with the end result being additional value extracted from the text.”

According to the post, “[i]n addition to returning the changes contained within each item of legislation, the [described] …process also returns the original legislation XML with additional annotations. These additional annotations should then permit enhanced outputs, such as additional links on the legislation.gov.uk website.”

Mr. Appleby’s post provides details about the process, screenshots, and some HTML output.

For more information, please see the complete post.

For more information about the technology underlying Legislation.gov.uk, please see John Sheridan’s VoxPopuLII post entitled Legislation.gov.uk.

Leibniz Center Publishes All Dutch National Statutes and Regulations on Free Web in XML and RDF

The Leibniz Center for Law at the University of Amsterdam announced yesterday that it has published all Dutch national statutes and regulations, free on the Web, in CEN MetaLex XML and RDF Linked Data, at The MetaLex Document Server.

According to Dr. Rinke Hoekstra, the database also includes “the body of regulations that govern the entire kingdom of The Netherlands (i.e. the former Dutch Antilles and Aruba).”

The technology underlying the service is explained in Dr. Hoekstra’s recent presentation, The MetaLex Document Server – Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data.

According to Dr. Hoekstra, a SPARQL endpoint for the Linked Data is available at http:doc.metalex.eu:8000/sparql .

For more information, please see the announcement, or contact Dr. Hoekstra.

HT @radboud and @rinkehoekstra.

Hoekstra on The MetaLex Document Server: Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data

Dr. Rinke Hoekstra of the University of Amsterdam’s Leibniz Center for Law has posted slides of a presentation entitled The MetaLex Document Server: Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data.

The slides describe an approach in which regulations from the Wetten.nl site were processed to enable improved public access, re-use, and inclusion of data in the Semantic Web. Regulations were marked up in CEN MetaLex XML format; persistent, “Cool” URIs — generated from Juriconnect URNs — were added to enable version control and transparency; annotations were automatically added to the regulations and encoded in RDF as Linked Data; and the content was made available via a RESTful API.

For more information, please see the slides.

HT @RinkeHoekstra.

Wyner, Towards Annotating and Extracting Textual Legal Case Elements

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship has published Towards Annotating and Extracting Textual Legal Case Elements, in LOAIT 2010: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Legal Ontologies and Artificial Intelligence Techniques, European University Institute, Fiesole, Florence, Italy, July 7th, 2010, at 9-18 (Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Piercarlo Rossi, and Daniela Tiscornia eds., 2010). Here is the abstract:

In common law contexts, legal cases are decided with respect to precedents rather than legislation as in civil law contexts. Legal professionals must find, analyse, and reason with and about cases drawn from a set of cases (a case base). A range of particular textual elements of a case may be relevant to query and extract. Commercial providers of legal information allow legal professionals to search a case base by keywords and meta data. However, the case base and the search tools are proprietary, of limited, non-extensible functionality, and are restricted access. Moreover, no provider applies natural language processing techniques to the cases for text analysis, XML annotation, or information acquisition. In this paper, we discuss an initial experiment in developing and applying natural language processing tools to cases to produce annotated text which can then support information extraction.

New Book: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language

Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Wim Peters, and Daniela Tiscornia (editors) have published Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language (2010). Click here for a description of the print version of the book.

According to Dr. Montemagni, the book “includes invited contributions of leading researchers and groups eminently active in the field together with the revised and expanded versions of selected papers presented at” SPLeT 2008: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, held 27 May 2008 in Marrakech, Morocco, in conjunction with LREC 2008: The 6th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.

Here are the contents of the volume:

• Giulia Venturi, Legal Language and Legal Knowledge Management Applications;
• Christopher Dozier, Ravikumar Kondadadi, Marc Light, Arun Vachher, Sriharsha Veeramachaneni, and Ramdev Wudali, Named Entity Recognition and Resolution in Legal Text;
• Paulo Quaresma and Teresa Gonçalves, Using Linguistic Information and Machine Learning Techniques to Identify Entities from Juridical Documents;
• Adam Wyner, Raquel Mochales-Palau, Marie-Francine Moens, and David Milward, Approaches to Text Mining Arguments from Legal Cases;
• Karel Pala, Pavel Rychlý, and Pavel Šmerk, Automatic Identification of Legal Terms in Czech Law Texts;
• Enrico Francesconi, Simonetta Montemagni, Wim Peters, and Daniela Tiscornia, Integrating a Bottom–Up and Top–Down Methodology for Building Semantic Resources for the Multilingual Legal Domain;
• Alessio Bosca and Luca Dini, Ontology Based Law Discovery;
• Gianmaria Ajani, Guido Boella, Leonardo Lesmo, Marco Martin, Alessandro Mazzei, Daniele P. Radicioni, and Piercarlo Rossi, Multilevel Legal Ontologies;
• Erich Schweighofer, Semantic Indexing of Legal Documents;
• Emile de Maat and Radboud Winkels, Automated Classification of Norms in Sources of Law;
• Eneldo Loza Mencía and Johannes Fürnkranz, Efficient Multilabel Classification Algorithms for Large-Scale Problems in the Legal Domain;
• Emmanuel Chieze, Atefeh Farzindar, and Guy Lapalme, An Automatic System for Summarization and Information Extraction of Legal Information;
• Yasuhiro Ogawa, Kazuhiro Imai, and Katsuhiko Toyama, Evaluation Metrics for Consistent Translation of Japanese Legal Sentences.

HT @bboissin.

Wyner & Peters: Towards Annotating and Extracting Textual Legal Case Factors

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Leeds Centre for Digital Citizenship and Dr. Wim Peters of the University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science will present a paper entitled Towards Annotating and Extracting Textual Legal Case Factors, at SPLeT 2010: The 3rd Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, to be held 23 May 2010 in Malta, in conjunction with LREC 2010: The 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Case based reasoning is a crucial aspect of common law practice, where lawyers select precedent cases which they use to argue for or against a decision in a current case. To select the precedents, the relevant facts (the case factors) of precedent cases must be identified; the factors predispose the case decision for one side or the other. As the factors of cases are linguistically expressed, it is useful to provide a means to automate the identification of candidate passages. We outline and report the results of our approach to the identification of legal case factors which follows a bottom-up knowledge heavy strategy and uses the General Architecture for Text Engineering system. Salient lexical items are selected, concept classes of related terms are created, and annotation rules for simple and compound concepts are provided. The annotated concepts can be extracted from the cases, and cases can be classified with respect to the concepts. In addition to supporting extraction of relevant information, the approach has a didactic use in helping to train lawyers to perform close textual analysis. Finally, we carry out an initial collaborative, online annotation exercise using GATE TeamWare in order to develop a gold standard.

Wyner: A Series of Posts on Legal Information Annotation & Extraction with GATE

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University College London Department of Computer Science has published a series of posts on legal information annotation and extraction, using GATE: The General Architecture for Text Engineering, on his blog, Language Logic Law Software.

The content of these posts was presented in Dr. Wyner’s tutorial at JURIX 2009, the slides of which are available here.