Wyner on Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science has published Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 39-41.

Here is the abstract:

Legislation and regulations are expressed in natural language. Machine-readable forms of the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translation to a logic. The paper considers the latter form, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a machine-readable logic, sentences must be parsed and semantically translated. Manual translation is time and labour intensive, usually involving narrowly scoping the rules. While automated translation systems have made significant progress, problems remain. The paper outlines systems to automatically translate legislative clauses to a semantic representation, highlighting key problems and proposing some tasks to address them.

Quaresma on Legal Information Extraction ← Machine Learning Algorithms + Linguistic Information

Professor Dr. Paulo Quaresma of Universidade de Évora Departamento de Informática has published Legal Information Extraction ← Machine Learning Algorithms + Linguistic Information, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 37-38.

Here is the abstract:

In order to automatically extract information from legal texts we propose the use of a mixed approach, using linguistic information and machine learning techniques. In the proposed architecture, lexical, syntactical, and semantical information is used as input for specialized machine learning algorithms, such as support vector machines. This approach was applied to collections of legal documents and the preliminary results were quite promising.

Larzi and Zarco-Tejada: JurWordNet and FrameNet Approaches to Meaning Representation: A Legal Case Study

Antonio Lazari of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and Dr. María Ángeles Zarco-Tejada of Universidad de Cádiz have published JurWordNet and FrameNet Approaches to Meaning Representation: A Legal Case Study, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 21-26.

Here is the abstract:

This paper describes JurWordNet, FrameNet and LOIS approaches towards meaning representation regarding the concept ‘State Liability’ from a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective. Our starting point has been the lexical and conceptual mismatching of legal terms that the process of harmonization in the European Union has manifested. Our study analyzes such concept in Italian, Spanish, French and English and shows how a deeper sub-language based representation of meaning is needed to account for such phenomena. We examine the most important computational-lexical models in an attempt to identify the most suitable and appropriate approach towards lexical-conceptual mismatching of the concept ‘State liability’ in the European legal tradition. Our proposal shows a formalization of the concept in the four systems mentioned and uses semantic features to represent lexical mismatching and cultural differences. With this study we show in a systematic way the differences in legal tradition and the reasons for divergence in the judicial use of related concepts.

Dell’Orletta et al. on The SPLeT–2012 Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts

Felice Dell’Orletta of l’Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR di Pisa (ILC-CNR), and colleagues, have published The SPLeT–2012 Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 42-51.

Here is the abstract:

The 4th Workshop on “Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” (SPLeT–2012) presents the first multilingual shared task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts. In this paper, we define the general task and its internal organization into sub–tasks, describe the datasets and the domain–specific linguistic peculiarities characterizing them. We finally report the results achieved by the participating systems, describe the underlying approaches and provide a first analysis of the final test results.

Wyner and Peters on Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware

Dr. Adam Wyner of the University of Liverpool Department of Computer Science and Dr. Wim Peters of the University of Sheffield Department of Computer Science, have published Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 34-36.

Here is the abstract:

Large corpora of legal texts are increasing available in the public domain. To make them amenable for automated text processing, various sorts of annotations must be added. We consider semantic annotations bearing on the content of the texts – legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. Adding annotations and developing gold standard corpora (to verify rule-based or machine learning algorithms) is costly in terms of time, expertise, and cost. To make the processes efficient, we propose several instances of GATE’s Teamware to support annotation tasks for legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. We engage annotation volunteers (law school students and legal professionals). The reports on the tasks are to be presented at the workshop.

For more information, please see Dr. Wyner’s post, Crowdsourced Legal Case Annotation.

Bacci, Francesconi, and Sagri: A Rule-based Parsing Approach for Detecting Case Law References in Italian Court Decisions

Lorenzo Bacci, Professor Dr. Enrico Francesconi, and Maria Teresa Sagri, all of ITTIG/CNR, have published A Rule-based Parsing Approach for Detecting Case Law References in Italian Court Decisions, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 27-33.

Here is the abstract:

In this paper a procedure able to detect legal references in Italian court decisions, providing automatic document hyperlinking is described. It is based on the adoption of a naming convention for case law documents, based on the metadata typically used in citations. The parsing strategy in particular is based on regular expressions, able to extract, from legal citations, the metadata used in the adopted naming convention. In particular the parser is able to implement both the ECLI and the LEX naming conventions for case law material.

Boella et al. on Using Legal Ontology to Improve Classification in the Eunomos Legal Document and Knowledge Management System

Professor Dr. Guido Boella of Università degli Studi di Torino Dipartimento di Informatica, and colleagues, have published Using Legal Ontology to Improve Classification in the Eunomos Legal Document and Knowledge Management System, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 13-20.

Here is the abstract:

We focus on the classification of descriptions of legal obligations in the Legal Taxonomy Syllabus. We compare the results of classification using increasing levels of semantic information. Firstly, we use the text of the concept description, analysed via the TULE syntactic parser, to disambiguate syntactically and select informative nouns. Secondly, we add as additional features for the classifier the concepts (via their ontological ID) which have been semi-automatically linked to the text by knowledge engineers in order to disambiguate the meaning of relevant phrases which are associated to concepts in the ontology. Thirdly, we consider concepts related to the prescriptions by relations such as deontological clause and sanction.

Venturi on the Design and Development of TEMIS: A Syntactically and Semantically Annotated Corpus of Italian Legislative Texts

Giulia Venturi of l’Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR di Pisa (ILC-CNR) has published Design and Development of TEMIS: a Syntactically and Semantically Annotated Corpus of Italian Legislative Texts, in LREC 2012 Conference Proceedings: Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT-2012) Workshop, pp. 1-12.

Here is the abstract:

Methodological issues concerning the design and the development of TEMIS, a syntactically and semantically annotated corpus of Italian legislative texts, are presented and discussed in the paper. TEMIS is a heterogeneous collection of texts exemplifying different sub–varieties of Italian legal language, i.e. European, national and local texts. The whole corpus has been dependency annotated and a subset has been enriched with frame–based information by customizing the formalism of the FrameNet project. In both cases, a number of domain–specific extensions of the annotation criteria developed for the general language has been foreseen. The interest in building such a corpus stems from the increasing need for annotated collections of domain–specific texts recognized by both the Artificial Intelligence and Law (AI & Law) community and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) one. In two research communities the benefits of having a resource where both domain–specific content and its underlying linguistic structure are made explicit and aligned are widely acknowledged. To the author knowledge, this is the first annotated corpus of legal texts overtly devoted to be used for legal text processing applications based on NLP tools.

Papers Available for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

Full text papers have been posted for SPLeT 2012: Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, being held 27 May 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Here is the list of papers:

• Giulia Venturi: Design and Development of TEMIS: a Syntactically and Semantically Annotated Corpus of Italian Legislative Texts
• Guido Boella, Luigi Di Caro, Llio Humphreys, Livio Robaldo: Using Legal Ontology to Improve Classification in the Eunomos Legal Document and Knowledge Management System
• Antonio Lazari, Mª Ángeles Zarco-Tejada: JurWordNet and FrameNet Approaches to Meaning Representation: a Legal Case Study
• Lorenzo Bacci, Enrico Francesconi, Maria Teresa Sagri: A Rule-based Parsing Approach for Detecting Case Law References in Italian Court Decisions
• Adam Wyner, Wim Peters: Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware
• Paulo Quaresma: Legal Information Extraction ← Machine Learning Algorithms + Linguistic Information
• Adam Wyner: Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts
• Felice Dell’Orletta, Simone Marchi, Simonetta Montemagni, Barbara Plank, Giulia Venturi: The SPLeT–2012 Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts
• Giuseppe Attardi, Daniele Sartiano and Maria Simi: Active Learning for Domain Adaptation of Dependency Parsing on Legal Texts
• Alessandro Mazzei, Cristina Bosco: Simple Parser Combination
• Niklas Nisbeth, Anders Søgaard: Parser combination under sample bias

Call for Participation: First Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts, SPLeT 2012

A call for participation — with registration deadline of 30 January 2012 — has been issued for the First Shared Task on Dependency Parsing of Legal Texts, part of SPLeT 2012: The “Semantic Processing of Legal Texts” Workshop, to be held 27 May 2012, in Istanbul, Turkey. (SPLeT 2012 is being held in conjunction with LREC-2012: The Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.)

According to the call:

[T]he goal of the shared task at SPLeT 2012 is to provide common and consistent task definitions and evaluation criteria for dependency parsing of legal texts in order to identify specific challenges posed by the analysis of this type of texts, to obtain a clearer idea of the current state-of-the-art, and to develop and share multilingual domain specific resources.

The languages dealt with will be English and Italian. Participants are expected to submit parsing results for at least one of the two languages involved, but they are strongly encouraged to submit results for both languages.

The task will be organized into two subtasks:

• a basic subtask (mandatory) focusing on dependency parsing of legal texts, aimed at testing the performance of general parsing systems on legal texts;
• a more challenging subtask (optional) focusing on the adaptation of general purpose dependency parsers to the legal domain, aimed at investigating methods and techniques for automatically extracting knowledge from large unlabelled target domain corpora to improve the performance of general parsing systems on legal texts.

For all deadlines, and for other information, please see the call for participation.

HT Dr. Giulia Venturi.