Caroline Uyttendaele

Abstracting of legal cases: the SALOMON experience

ing of Legal Cases: The SALOMON Experience Marie-Francine Moens, Caroline Uyttendaele, Jos Dumortier Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and IT (ICRI) K.U. Leuven Tiensestraat 41 B-3000 Leuven Belgium {marie-france.moens, caroline.uyttendaele, jos.dumortier}@law.kuleuven.ac.be

Abstracting of legal cases: the potential of clustering based on the selection of representative objects

The SALOMON project automatically summarizes Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future court decisions. SALOMON extracts text units from the case text to form a case summary. Such a case summary facilitates the rapid determination of the relevance of the case or may be employed in text search. An important part of the research concerns the development of techniques for automatic recognition of representative text paragraphs (or sentences) in texts of unrestricted domains. These techniques are employed to eliminate redundant material in the case texts, and to identify informative text paragraphs which are relevant to include in the case An evaluation of a test set of 700 criminal cases demonstrates that the algorithms have an application potential for automatic indexing, abstracting, and text linking.

Salomon: Automatic Abstracting of Legal Cases for Effective Access to Court Decisions

The SALOMON project is a contribution to the automatic processing of legal texts. Its aim is to automatically summarise Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future cases. Therefore, techniques are developed for identifying and extracting relevant information from the cases. A broader application of these techniques could considerably simplify the work of the legal profession.A double methodology was used when developing SALOMON: the cases are processed by employing additional knowledge to interpret structural patterns and features on the one hand and by way of occurrence statistics of index terms on the other. As a result, SALOMON performs an initial categorisation and structuring of the cases and subsequently extracts the most relevant text units of the alleged offences and of the opinion of the court. The SALOMON techniques do not themselves solve any legal questions, but they do guide the user effectively towards relevant texts.

Automatic text structuring and categorization as a first step in summarizing legal cases

Abstract The SALOMON system automatically summarizes Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future court decisions. SALOMON extracts relevant text units from the case text to form a case summary. Such a case profile facilitates the rapid determination of the relevance of the case or may be employed in text search. In a first important abstracting step SALOMON performs an initial categorization of legal criminal cases and structures the case text into separate legally relevant and irrelevant components. A text grammar represented as a semantic network is used to automatically determine the category of the case and its components. In this way, we are able to extract from the case general data and to identify text portions relevant for further abstracting. It is argued that prior knowledge of the text structure and its indicative cues may support automatic abstracting. A text grammar is a promising form for representing the knowledge involved.

Information extraction from legal texts: the potential of discourse analysis

Abstract There is an urgent need to automatically identify information in legal texts. In this paper, we argue that discourse analysis yields valuable knowledge to be incorporated in text processing systems. Knowledge about discourse patterns has already been applied in legal text generation systems. But, it is equally important to incorporate this kind of knowledge in legal information extraction systems. This knowledge is helpful for locating information in texts. Also, we demonstrate the need for adequate, maintainable, and possibly sharable knowledge representations of discourse patterns. The findings are illustrated by explicating the role discourse analysis played when building the SALOMON system, a system that automatically abstracts Belgian criminal cases.

Convergence between telecommunications and audiovisual communications: perspectives for media law on the information highway

Abstract Convergence between telecommunications and audiovisual media is highly problematic from a legal point of view. It gives rise to the merger of two completely divergent legal systems: telecommunications law and media law. In this article we inquire to what extent media legislation is applicable to the converging environment of the information highway. All media law concerns directly or indirectly the freedom of speech. It serves on the one hand for protecting free speech, on the other hand for preventing abusive speech. It is important to notice that in the course of time, and simultaneously with the successful rise of radio and television, restrictions to free speech have greatly increased. Media law deals with all three layers of the communication process: exteriorisation, dissemination and reception of messages. The emergence of new converging communication technologies does not necessitate the invention of new legal principles. Both aspects of media law, protecting and restricting free speech, remain relevant in a converging context.