Francesconi E., Montemagni S., Peters W., Tiscornia D. (eds.) Semantic Processing of Legal Texts. Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language

Springer, 2010. — 251 p.The legal domain represents a primary candidate for Web-based information distribution, exchange and management, as testified by the numerous e-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, semantic and cross-language legal information retrieval, document classification, legal drafting, legal knowledge discovery and extraction. Many efforts have also been devoted to the construction of legal ontologies and their application to 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: among them, the ICAIL (International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law) and the Jurix (International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems) conferences; several workshops on legal ontologies have been held by the AI&Law Association (LOAIT) and by the Legal XML Community (LegalXML Workshops and Legal XML Summer School). In all these events, the topics of language resources and human language technologies receive increasing attention.
The situation is quite different within the computational linguistics community, where little attention has been paid to the legal domain besides a few isolated contributions and/or projects focussing on the processing of legal texts. 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 workshop offered 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 management. Both research communities can benefit from this interaction: the legal artificial intelligence community can gain insight into state–of–the–art linguistic 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 Language Processing (NLP) technologies and tools. The main focus of the workshop was the automatic extraction of relevant information from legal texts and the structured organization of this extracted knowledge for legal knowledge representation 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 approaches witnessed by the accepted papers, the number and variety of participants from 17 different countries all over the world, both from the academic and industrial communities and with different (i.e., legal, linguistic as well as computational) backgrounds, as well as the stimulating discussion both speakers and attendees engaged in during the workshop indicate this as a promising field, which combines legal informatics and natural language processing in innovative and productive ways. This fact persuaded us to invest some 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, covering some of the main issues in current research on semantic processing of legal texts, as well as providing new exciting avenues for the years to come. The papers report research from the academic and industrial communities, from different countries dealing with different languages, including less–resourced ones, and all together provide an articulated picture of the current achievements and challenges in the field. We are aware that several books have been published in the legal artificial intelligence community on topics such as legal standards and legal ontologies.
Up to now, however, no comprehensive overview of the field of semantic processing of legal texts exists, combining views and perspectives from the computational linguistic and legal communities. The volume intends to fill this gap, by enabling readers to gain insight into state–of–the–art NLP technologies, tools and the availability 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 challenges of the field are tackled from different perspectives, thus providing the reader with an overview of the current debate.Part I – Legal Text Processing and Information Extraction
Legal Language and Legal Knowledge Management Applications
Named Entity Recognition and Resolution in Legal Text
Using Linguistic Information and Machine Learning Techniques to Identify Entities from Juridical Documents
Approaches to Text Mining Arguments from Legal Cases
Part II – Legal Text Processing and Construction of Knowledge Resources
Automatic Identification of Legal Terms in Czech Law Texts
Integrating a Bottom–Up and Top–Down Methodology for Building Semantic Resources for the Multilingual Legal Domain
Ontology Based Law Discovery
Multilevel Legal Ontologies
Part III – Legal Text Processing and Semantic Indexing, Summarization and Translation
Semantic Indexing of Legal Documents
Automated Classification of Norms in Sources of Law
Efficient Multilabel Classification Algorithms for Large-Scale Problems in the Legal Domain
An Automatic System for Summarization and Information Extraction of Legal Information
Evaluation Metrics for Consistent Translation of Japanese Legal Sentences