Computational linguistic support for legal ontology construction

ABSTRACT

The potential of knowledge-based technological support for work in the legal domain has become widely recognized in recent time. This paper argues for an approach that is meant to complement existing work on top-level, statute-based ontologies for the law by extracting conceptual knowledge from verdict texts. Starting from a corpus-based survey on the definition and modification of concepts in German court verdicts we are currently working out a detailed description of the linguistic structures and semantic mechanisms involved. Based on this we want to develop tools that automatically recognize and process portions of verdicts that contain definitions. The resulting system will support the corpus-based extension of (hand-made) top-level legal ontologies and the update of legal terminological knowledge bases with regard to new jurisdiction. The research described in the paper is conducted at the Saarbrücken computational linguistics (CL) group within the project CORTE (computational linguistic methods for legal terminology).

REFERENCES

• 1: Franz Baader , Diego Calvanese , Deborah L. McGuinness , Daniele Nardi , Peter F. Patel-Schneider, The description logic handbook: theory, implementation, and applications, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2003
• 2: Braun, C. Parsing German text for syntacto-semantic structures. In Prospects and Advances in the Syntax/Semantics Interface, Lorraine-Saarland Workshop Series, Nancy, France, 2003, 99--102.
• 3: Breuker, J. and Hoekstra, R. Core concepts of law: taking common-sense seriously. In Proceedings of Formal Ontologies in Information Systems (FOIS-2004). IOS-Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2004.
• 4: Hart, H. L. A. The concept of Law. Oxford University Press, London, 1961.
• 5: Valente, A. Legal Knowledge Engineering: A Modelling Approach. IOS Press, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1995.
• 6: Robert W. Van Kralingen, Frame-Based Conceptual Models of Statute Law, Kluwer Law Intl, 1995