Enrico Francesconi

Automatic semantics extraction in law documents

Normative texts can be viewed as composed by formal partitions (articles, paragraphs, etc.) or by semantic units containing fragments of a regulation (provisions). Provisions can be described according to a metadata scheme which consists of provision types and their arguments. This semantic annotation of a normative text can make the retrieval of norms easier. The detection and description of the provisions according to the established metadata scheme is an analytic intellectual activity aiming at classifying portions of a normative text into provision types and to extract their arguments. Automatic facilities supporting this intellectual activity are desirable. Particularly, in this paper, two modules able to qualify fragments of a normative text in terms of provision types and to extract their arguments are presented.

Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

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.- 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.- 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.

Automatic classification of provisions in legislative texts

Legislation usually lacks a systematic organization which makes the management and the access to norms a hard problem to face. A more analytic semantic unit of reference (provision) for legislative texts was identified. A model of provisions (provisions types and their arguments) allows to describe the semantics of rules in legislative texts. It can be used to develop advanced semantic-based applications and services on legislation. In this paper an automatic bottom-up strategy to qualify existing legislative texts in terms of provision types is described.

Legislative XML for the Semantic Web: Principles, Models, Standards for Document Management

This volume examines the basic layers of the standard-based creation and usage of legislation. In particular, it addresses the identification of legislative documents, their structure, the basic metadata and legislative changes. Since mature technologies and established practices are already in place for these layers, a standard-based approach is a necessary aspect of the up-to-date management of legislative resources. Starting out with an overview of the context for the use of XML standards in legislation, the book next examines the rationale of standard-based management of legislative documents. It goes on to address such issues as naming, the Akoma-Ntoso document model, the contribution of standard-based document management to handling legislative dynamics, meta-standards and interchange standards. The volume concludes with a discussion of semantic resources and a reviewon systems and projects.

Integrating a bottom–up and top–down methodology for building semantic resources for the multilingual legal domain

This article presents a methodology for multilingual legal knowledge acquisition and modelling. It encompasses two comlementary strategies. On the one hand, there is the top–down definition of the conceptual structure of the legal domain under consideration on the basis of expert jugdment. This structure is language–independent, modeled as an ontology, and can be aligned with other ontologies that capture similar or complementary knowledge, in order to provide a wider conceptual embedding. Another top–down approach is the exploitation of the explicit structure of legal texts, which enables the targeted identification of text spans that play an ontological role and their subsequent inclusion in the knowledge model. On the other hand, the linguistically motivated, text-based bottom–up population and incremental refinement of this conceptual structure using (semi-)automatic NLP techniques, maximizes the completeness and domain-specificity of the resulting knowledge. The proposed methodology is concerned with the relation between these two differently derived types of knowledge, and defines a framework for interfacing lexical and ontological knowledge, the result of which offers various perspectives on multilingual legal knowledge. Two case-studies combining bottom-up and top-down methodologies for knowledge modelling and learning are presented as illustrations of the methodology.

Building Semantic Resources for Legislative Drafting: The DALOS Project

The DALOS Project aims at building an ontological- linguistic resource to be used in the multilingual EU legislative drafting process, as well as in a linguistically reliable national transpositions of EU directives. This paper outlines the design of the ontological-linguistic resource, as well as the main phases carried on for its implementation.

Domain Adaptation for Dependency Parsing at Evalita 2011

The domain adaptation task was aimed at investigating techniques for adapting state–of–the–art dependency parsing systems to new domains. Both the language dealt with, i.e. Italian, and the target domain, namely the legal domain, represent two main novelties of the task organised at Evalita 2011 with respect to previous domain adaptation initiatives. In this paper, we define the task and describe how the datasets were created from different resources. In addition, we characterize the different approaches of the participating systems, report the test results, and provide a first analysis of these results.

A legal drafting environment based on formal and semantic XML standards

The NIR project aims at making retrieval and navigation among normative documents in a distributed environment easier. To obtain this, XML and URN standards for normative documents have been established and the construction of tools working on these standards is promoted. Particularly, NIREditor, a specific drafting environment able to deal with new and legacy normative documents has been developed.

Searching and retrieving legal literature through automated semantic indexing

Access to legal information and, in particular, to legal literature is examined in conjunction with the creation of a Portal to Italian legal doctrine. The design and implementation of services such as integrated access to a wide range of resources are described, with a particular focus on the importance of exploiting metadata assigned to disparate legal material. The integration of structured repositories and Web documents is the main purpose of the Portal: it is constructed on the basis of a federation system with service provider functions, aiming at creating a centralized index of legal resources. The index is based on a uniform metadata view created for structured data by means of the OAI approach and for Web documents by a machine learning approach. Subject searching is a major requirement for legal literature users and a solution based on the exploitation of Dublin Core metadata, as well as the use of legal ontologies and related terms prepared for accessing indexed articles have been implemented.

Ontology Based Legislative Drafting: Design and Implementation of a Multilingual Knowledge Resource

The DALOS project aims at ensuring coherence and alignment in the legislative language, providing law-makers with knowledge management tools to improve the control over the multilingual complexity of European legislation and over the linguistic and conceptual issues involved in its transposition into national laws. This paper describes the design and implementation activities performed on the basis of a set of parallel texts in different languages on a specific legal topic. Natural language processing techniques have been applied to automatically build lexicons for each language. Lexical and conceptual multilingual alignment has been accomplished exploiting terms position in parallel documents. An ontology describing entities involved in the chosen domain has been developed in order to provide a semantic description of terms in lexicons. A modular integration of such resources, represented in RDF/OWL standard format, allowed their effective and flexible access from a legislative drafting application prototype, able to enrich legal documents with terms mark-up and semantic annotations.