Fernández-Barrera on User-Generated Knowledge Through Legal Ontologies

Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of Cersa (Centre d’Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques)- CNRS has successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis, entitled User-generated knowledge through legal ontologies: how to bring the law into the Semantic Web 2.0, at the European University Institute Department of Law, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID.

Here is the abstract:

This thesis presents a study of the epistemological and cognitive assumptions which currently underlie knowledge acquisition for legal ontology engineering. The hypothesis is that such assumptions might have a qualitative effect on the final ontological-terminological resources and therefore on the performance of the systems which use them.The first part of the thesis presents the state of the art in legal ontology engineering (the computational concept of ontology, a review of available legal ontologies and modelling methodologies). The second part of the thesis shows that currently knowledge acquisition in legal ontology learning is limited to very concrete legal genres, namely, legislation, case law and legal doctrine. The third part presents a case study in which two different legal genres are used for building a consumer law ontology: a traditional legal genre, Italian consumer regulation, and a Web 2.0 genre, namely an online corpus of citizens‟ queries regarding consumer justice. Results proof the impact of legal genre variation on the construction of the domain ontology. Thus main findings suggest that Web 2.0 corpora are a rich source for the construction of ontological resources, and at the same time these new types of ontological resources might be useful in e-government applications aimed at increasing online communication with citizens.

Some parts of the thesis are summarized in Dr. Fernández-Barrera’s recent VoxPopuLII post, entitled Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?

For the full text of the thesis, please contact Dr. Fernández-Barrera.

New on VoxPopuLII: Fernández-Barrera on Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?

Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of Cersa (Centre d’Études et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques)- CNRS has posted Legal Prosumers: How Can Government Leverage User-Generated Content?, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Dr. Fernández-Barrera describes new, innovative methods of analyzing very large quantities of law-related user-generated content.

In two recent studies described in the post, Dr. Fernández-Barrera and colleagues analyzed thousands of consumer law queries and complaints submitted by citizens to consumer protection agencies in Spain and Italy. Using a combination of automated text extraction techniques and expert input from lawyers, the researchers mapped the citizens’ lay terminology to formal legal terms. The technical legal language was expressed in legal ontologies — the Mediation Core Ontology and the Consumer Mediation Ontology — or in statutes: the Italian Consumer Code. The results of this research give us new insights about citizens’ knowledge of consumer law, and about the relationships between formal legal language and the way law is expressed in lay language.

Dr. Fernández-Barrera then describes her recent research into methods for making legal semantic analysis of user-generated content scalable. In studies of citizens’ online queries about consumer law and noise-nuisance complaints, she and her colleagues found that by focusing on language patterns involving emotions, events, and “stereotypical situations appearing in the description of legal cases by citizens,” automated techniques alone could successfully analyze very large quantities of user-generated content. Dr. Fernández-Barrera concludes by reflecting on the ethical dimensions of governments’ use of citizen comments in law- and policy making.

This post should be of interest to policy makers, the e-government and Government 2.0 communities, the Web 2.0 community, those who study legal language, and developers of legal information systems.

Abstracts for Papers Presented at Current Legal Issues Colloquium 2011: Law and Language

Abstracts have been posted for the papers presented at Current Legal Issues Colloquium 2011 – Law and Language, held 4-5 July 2011 at University College London Faculty of Laws. The papers concern a range of current issues in the fields of linguistics, text analysis, rhetoric, and textual interpretation, all as applied to legal texts.

Sartor et al. on Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies

Approaches to Legal Ontologies: Theories, Domains, Methodologies (Springer 2011), a collection of scholarly articles on legal ontologies, has been published.

The volume is edited by Professor Dr. Giovanni Sartor of Università di Bologna CIRSFID, Professor Dr. Pompeu Casanovas of the Institute of Law & Technology (IDT) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Maria Angela Biasiotti of ITTIG/CNR, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera of the European University Institute Department of Law.

This is the first volume in Springer’s new Law, Governance, and Technology Series, edited by Professors Casanovas and Sartor.

Some of the articles in this volume are based on papers originally presented at the Workshop on Approaches to Legal Ontologies, held 9-10 December 2008, at European University Institute Department of Law, in Fiesole, Florence, Italy.

Here are the contents:

1. Introduction: Theory and Methodology in Legal Ontology Engineering: Experiences and Future Directions / Pompeu Casanovas, Giovanni Sartor, Maria Angela Biasiotti, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
2. The Legal Theory Perspective: Doctrinal Conceptual Systems vs. Computational Ontologies / Meritxell Fernández-Barrera and Giovanni Sartor
3. Empirically Grounded Developments of Legal Ontologies: A Socio-Legal Perspective / Pompeu Casanovas, Núria Casellas, and Joan-Josep Vallbé
4. A Cognitive Science Perspective on Legal Ontologies / Joost Breuker and Rinke Hoekstra
5. Social Ontology and Documentality / Maurizio Ferraris
6. The Case-Based Reasoning Approach: Ontologies for Analogical Legal Argument / Kevin D. Ashley
7. A Complex-System Approach: Legal Knowledge, Ontology, Information and Networks / Pierre Mazzega, Danièle Bourcier, Paul Bourgine, Nadia Nadah, and Romain Boulet
8. The Multi-Layered Legal Information Perspective / Guido Boella and PierCarlo Rossi
9. Legal Ontologies: The Linguistic Perspective / Maria Angela Biasiotti and Daniela Tiscornia
10. A Legal Document Ontology: The Missing Layer in Legal Document Modelling / Monica Palmirani, Luca Cervone, and Fabio Vitali
11. From Thesaurus Towards Ontologies in Large Legal Databases / Ángel Sancho Ferrer, Carlos Fernández Hernández, and José Manuel Mateo Rivero
12. The Computational Ontology Perspective: Design Patterns for Web Ontologies / Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti, and Eva Blomqvist
13. A Learning Approach for Knowledge Acquisition in the Legal Domain / Enrico Francesconi
14. Towards an Ontological Foundation for Services Science: The Legal Perspective / Roberta Ferrario, Nicola Guarino, and Meritxell Fernández-Barrera
15. Legal Multimedia Ontologies and Semantic Annotation
    for Search and Retrieval / Jorge González-Conejero

Azuelos-Atias On the Incoherence of Legal Language to the General Public

Dr. Sol Azuelos-Atias of the University of Haifa Department of Hebrew Language has published On the Incoherence of Legal Language to the General Public, forthcoming in International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. Here is the abstract:

I will suggest, in this article, a possible explanation of the fact that legal language appears incoherent to the general public. I will present one legal text (an indictment), explaining why it appears incoherent to legal laypersons. I will argue that the traits making this particular text appear incoherent are, first, that a specialized legal meaning is conveyed implicitly and, second, that there are no key-words that could direct laypersons to the knowledge making this meaning obvious to legalists. I will conclude that any legal text having these traits is likely to appear incoherent to the general public and suggest that the traits making my example appear incoherent might be rather common among the various texts of the various legal systems. On this suggestion there is no need to assume any causal relation between lawyers’ social interests and the apparent incoherence of legal language as it entails that this incoherence is inevitable. (I will argue that it is a result of the facts that legal language is ordinary language used, in the ordinary way, in the special context of the legal discourse.)

Katz & Bommarito’s Visualization of the Complete United States Code

Daniel Martin Katz & Michael Bommarito, both of the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems, have completed their visualization of the structure of the entire United States Code, published at their Computational Legal Studies blog. This is another example of their exciting and innovative work — discussed in this earlier post — respecting the graphic depiction of quantitative legal information.

Visualization of Quantitative Legal Information

[NOTE: Updated on 8-1-2009 to include a reference to continuing legal education.]

A recent trend in legal information systems development & scholarship is the use of software to generate graphical representations, often referred to as “visualizations,” of quantitative law-related information.

Wolfram Research‘s Wolfram Demonstration Project currently features more than five dozen software applications that generate graphical depictions of various types of legal statistics. After downloading the free Mathematica 7 software, users can interact with each application by adjusting variables or other parameters, and then viewing the altered graphical display. Development of new applications utilizes crowdsourcing: Wolfram grants users free access to the software, with which users may develop new applications, provided the users agree to license those applications back to Wolfram, pursuant to Wolfram’s Submission Policy. Wolfram provides guidelines and free online seminars on authoring applications. HT to Jim McMillan of Court Technology Bulletin for notifying the legal community of this project.

Another example of innovation in the use of visualization techniques respecting legal information is the work of Daniel Martin Katz & Michael Bommarito, at the Computational Legal Studies blog. Both researchers are Ph.D. students in the University of Michigan’s Political Science Department and both are affiliated with the university’s Center for the Study of Complex Systems. At their blog, Katz & Bommarito highlight their recent work involving the graphical display of quantitative legal information, including visualizations of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code and of citations and semantic relationships in U.S. Supreme Court decisions. The authors also discuss and provide examples of some of their code. Further, Katz & Bommarito frequently discuss interesting visualizations produced by others, such as Good’s interactive visualization of public corruption convictions and Dr. Will Lowe’s presentation on Computational Linguistics and Law.

The applications and techniques featured in the Wolfram Demonstration Project and the Computational Legal Studies blog appear to have a number of potential uses, including courtroom display, empirical legal research, law school instruction, continuing legal education, and public policy work. These projects also exemplify the current, fruitful interaction among scholars and programmers collaborating at the intersections of law, political science, computer science, information science, and linguistics.