Modeling expert knowledge in the mediation domain: a middle-out approach to design ODR ontologies

In this paper we describe the steps taken to model expert knowledge within the mediation domain as the basis for the design of the Mediation Core Ontology (MCO), of which we also offer a first outline of its present stage of development. MCO is created from scratch by eliciting practical knowledge from mediation experts to identify the basic working concepts of the domain. MCO offers initial support towards knowledge acquisition and reasoning and, in later steps, will serve as a general basis for the development of different mediation domain and sub-domain ontologies to be used by the ONTOMEDIA mediation platform, currently also under development

Towards a FrameNet Resource for the Legal Domain

In the AI&Law community, the importance of frame-based ontologies has been acknowledged since the early 90\u27s with the Van Kralingen\u27s proposal of a frame language for legal knowledge representation. This still appears to be a strongly felt need within the community. In this paper, we propose to face this need by developing a FrameNet resource for the legal domain based on Fillmore\u27s Frame Semantics, whose final outocme will include a frame-based lexical ontology and a legal corpus annotated with frame information. In particular, the paper focuses on methodological and design issues, ranging from the customization and extension of the general FrameNet for the legal domain to the linking of the developed resource with already existing Legal Ontologies

ODR, ontologies, and web 2.0

Online communities and institutions create new spaces for interaction, but also open new avenues for the emergence of grievances, claims, and disputes. Consequently, online dispute resolution (ODR) procedures are core to these new online worlds. But can ODR mechanisms provide sufficient levels of reputation, trust, and enforceability for it to become mainstream? This contribution introduces the new approaches to ODR and provides a description of the design and structure of Ontomedia, a web-based platform to facilitate online mediation in different domain

An Argumentation-Based Legal Reasoning Approach for DL-Ontology

Ontology is a popular method for knowledge representation in different domains, including the legal domain, and description logics (DL) is commonly used as its description language. To handle reasoning based on inconsistent DL-based legal ontologies, the current paper presents a structured argumentation framework particularly for reasoning in legal contexts on the basis of ASPIC+, and translates the legal ontology into formulas and rules of an argumentation theory. With a particular focus on the design of autonomous vehicles from the perspective of legal AI, we show that using this combined theory of formal argumentation and DL-based legal ontology, acceptable assertions can be obtained based on inconsistent ontologies, and the traditional reasoning tasks of DL ontologies can also be accomplished. In addition, a formal definition of explanations for the result of reasoning is presented.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur

The process of building the upper-level hierarchy for the aircraft structure ontology to be integrated in FunGramKB

In this article we collect a corpus of texts which operate with a controlled language (ASD Simplified Technical English) in order to facilitate the development of a new domain-specific ontology (the aircraft structure) based on a technical discipline (aeronautical engineering) included in the so called “hard” sciences. This new repository should be compatible with the Core Ontology and the corresponding English Lexicon in FunGramKB (a multipurpose lexico-conceptual knowledge base for natural language processing (NLP)), and, in the same vein, should eventually give support to aircraft maintenance management systems. By contrast, in previous approaches we applied a stepwise methodology for the construction of a domain-specific subontology compatible with FunGramKB systems in criminal law, but the high occurrence of terminological banalisation and the scarce number of specific terms, due to the social nature of the discipline, were added problems to the most common NLP difficulties (polysemy and ambiguity). Taking into consideration previous results and the complexity of this task, here we only intend to take the first step towards the modelling of the aircraft ontology: the development of its taxonomic hierarchy. Consequently, the hierarchy starts with the whole system (i.e., an aircraft) and follows the traditional decomposition of the system down to the elementary components (top-down approach). At the same time, we have collected a corpus of 2,480 files of aircraft maintenance instructions, courtesy of Airbus in Seville. For the bottom-up approach (under construction), we consult specialised references end explore the corpus through the identification and extraction of term candidates with DEXTER, an online multilingual workbench especially designed for the discovery and extraction of terms

Los modelos de semántica de marcos para la representación del conocimiento jurídico en el Derecho Comparado: el caso de la responsabilidad del Estado

En aquest article s'analitza en profunditat i es realitza una proposta de representació del coneixement jurídic subjacent al concepte de responsabilitat de l'Estat des d'una perspectiva multilingüe i juscomparativa. Per a això, es proposa d'augmentar la informació dels marcs semàntics (a partir d'ara, marcs) a través dels semantic types en el sistema FrameNet, amb el doble objectiu de servir com a representació interlingua del coneixement jurídic i de formalitzar les causes del desajust lèxic i conceptual dels sistemes jurídics. S'estudia el principi de responsabilitat de l'Estat en els models espanyol, anglès, francès i italià i es demostra com una descripció més detallada del coneixement jurídic, a través de la vinculació dels frame elements (a partir d'ara designats amb l'acrònim FE) dels marcs amb els tipus semàntics [±sentient], possibilita no només la utilització d'aquests com a representació interlingua, sinó, a més, procura explicar les divergències/convergències dels diferents plantejaments del concepte de responsabilitat de l'Estat, ancorats en contextos socioculturals de diferent tradició. La present proposta evidencia els avantatges de l'esmentada formalització com a model explicatiu del procés dinàmic de vaig donar/convergència en la jurisprudència del Tribunal de Justícia de la Unió Europea (a partir d'ara designat amb la sigla TJUE).This article offers an in-depth analysis, and proposes a representation of the legal knowledge underlying the concept of State responsibility from a multilingual and comparative law perspective. To this end, it recommends increasing information on frame semantics (hereinafter, frames) through the semantic types in the FrameNet system, with the double purpose of acting as an interlingual representation of legal knowledge and formalising the causes for lexical and conceptual imbalances in legal systems. The article studies the principle of State responsibility in the Spanish, English, French and Italian models and shows how a more detailed description of legal knowledge through the linking of the frame elements (hereinafter designed by the acronym FE) of the frames with the semantic types [±sentient], makes it feasible not just to use these as an interlingual representation, but also to try to explain the divergences/convergences of the various approaches to the concept of the State responsibility that are rooted in sociocultural contexts of a different tradition. This proposal demonstrates the advantages of this formalisation as a model to explain the dynamic process of divergence/convergence in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (referred to hereinafter by the acronym CJEU).En este artículo se analiza en profundidad y se realiza una propuesta de representación del conocimiento jurídico subyacente al concepto de responsabilidad del Estado desde una perspectiva multilingüe y juscomparativa. Para ello, se propone aumentar la información de los marcos semánticos (a partir de ahora, marcos) a través de los semantic types en el sistema FrameNet, con el doble objetivo de servir como representación interlingüe del conocimiento jurídico y de formalizar las causas del desajuste léxico y conceptual de los sistemas jurídicos. Se estudia el principio de responsabilidad del Estado en los modelos español, inglés, francés e italiano y se demuestra cómo una descripción más detallada del conocimiento jurídico, a través de la vinculación de los frame elements (a partir de ahora designados con el acrónimo FE) de los marcos con los tipos semánticos [±sentient], posibilita no solo la utilización de estos como representación interlingüe, sino, además, procura explicar las divergencias/convergencias de los distintos planteamientos del concepto de responsabilidad del Estado, anclados en contextos socioculturales de diferente tradición. La presente propuesta evidencia las ventajas de dicha formalización como modelo explicativo del proceso dinámico de di/convergencia en la jurisprudencia del Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea (a partir de ahora designado con la sigla TJUE)

The process of constructing ontological meaning based on criminal law verbs

This study intends to account for the process involved in the construction of the conceptual meaning of verbs (#EVENTS) directly related to legal aspects of terrorism and organized crime based on the evidence provided by the Globalcrimeterm Corpus and the consistent application of specific criteria for term extraction. The selected 49 concepts have eventually been integrated in the Core Ontology of FunGramKB (Functional Grammar Knowledge Base), a knowledge base which is founded on the principles of deep semantics and is also aimed at the computational development of the Lexical Constructional Model (www.fungramkb.com). To achieve this purpose, key phases of the COHERENT methodology (Periñán Pascual & Mairal Usón 2011) are followed, particularly those which involve the modelling, subsumption and hierarchisation of the aforementioned verbal concepts. The final outcome of this research shows that most of the apparently specialised conceptual units should eventually be included in the Core Ontology instead of the specific Globalcrimeterm Subontology, due to the fact that the semantic content of their corresponding lexical units can be found in widely used learner`s dictionaries and, consequently, this conceptual information is not only shared by the experts in the field but also by the layperson and the average speaker of the language

Enhancing domain-specific ontologies at ease

International audienceWe present a methodology to enhance domain-specific ontologies by (i) manual annotation of texts with the concepts in the domain ontology, (ii) matching annotated concepts with the closest YAGO-Wikipedia concept and (iii) using concepts from other ontologies that cover complementary domains. This method reduces the difficulty of aligning ontologies, because the alignment is carried out within the scope of an example. The resulting alignment is a partial connection between diverse ontologies, and also a strong connection to Linked Open Data. By aligning these ontologies, we are increasing the ontological coverage for texts in that domain. Moreover, by aligning domain ontologies to the Wikipedia (via YAGO) we can obtain manually annotated examples of some of the concepts, effectively populating the ontology with examples. We present two applications of this process in the legal domain. First, we annotate sentences of the European Court of Human Rights with the LKIF ontology, at the same time matching them with the YAGO ontology. Second, we annotate a corpus of customer questions and answers from an insurance web page with the OMG ontology for the insurance domain, matching it with the YAGO ontology and complementing it with a financial ontology

Bottom-up enrichment of top-down ontologies through annotation

International audienceWe present a methodology to enhance domain-specific ontologies by (i) addressing a manual annotation of texts with the concepts in the domain ontology, (ii) matching the annotated concepts with the closest YAGO-Wikipedia concept available, and (iii) using concepts from other ontologies that cover complementary domains. This method reduces the difficulty of aligning ontologies, because annotators are asked to associate two labels from different inventories to a concrete example, which requires a simple judgment. In a second phase, those correspondences are consolidated into a proper alignment. The resulting alignment is a partial connection between diverse ontologies, and also a strong connection to Linked Open Data. By aligning these ontologies, we are increasing the ontological coverage for texts in that domain. Moreover, by aligning domain on-tologies to the Wikipedia (via YAGO), we can obtain manually annotated examples for some of the concepts, effectively populating the ontology with examples. We present two applications of this process in the legal domain. First, we annotate sentences of the European Court of Human Rights with the LKIF ontology, at the same time matching them with the YAGO ontology. Second, we annotate a corpus of customer questions and answers from an insurance web page with the P&C ontology for the insurance domain, matching it with the YAGO ontology and complementing it with a financial ontology