Passage retrieval in legal texts

[EN] Legal texts usually comprise many kinds of texts, such as contracts, patents and treaties. These texts usually include a huge quantity of unstructured information written in natural language. Thanks to automatic analysis and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques, it is possible to filter out information that is not relevant and, therefore, to reduce the amount of documents that users need to browse to find the information they are looking for. In this paper we adapted the JIRS passage retrieval system to work with three kinds of legal texts: treaties, patents and contracts, studying the issues related with the processing of this kind of information. In particular, we studied how a passage retrieval system might be linked up to automated analysis based on logic and algebraic programming for the detection of conflicts in contracts. In our set-up, a contract is translated into formal clauses, which are analysed by means of a model checking tool; then, the passage retrieval system is used to extract conflicting sentences from the original contract text. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.We thank the MICINN (Plan I+D+i) TEXT-ENTERPRISE 2.0: (TIN2009-13391-C04-03) research project. The work of the second author has been possible thanks to a scholarship funded by Maat Gknowledge in the framework of the project with the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia Módulo de servicios semánticos de la plataforma GRosso, P.; Correa García, S.; Buscaldi, D. (2011). Passage retrieval in legal texts. Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming. 80(3-5):139-153. doi:10.1016/j.jlap.2011.02.001S139153803-

Abstract syntax as interlingua: Scaling up the grammatical framework from controlled languages to robust pipelines

Syntax is an interlingual representation used in compilers. Grammatical Framework (GF) applies the abstract syntax idea to natural languages. The development of GF started in 1998, first as a tool for controlled language implementations, where it has gained an established position in both academic and commercial projects. GF provides grammar resources for over 40 languages, enabling accurate generation and translation, as well as grammar engineering tools and components for mobile and Web applications. On the research side, the focus in the last ten years has been on scaling up GF to wide-coverage language processing. The concept of abstract syntax offers a unified view on many other approaches: Universal Dependencies, WordNets, FrameNets, Construction Grammars, and Abstract Meaning Representations. This makes it possible for GF to utilize data from the other approaches and to build robust pipelines. In return, GF can contribute to data-driven approaches by methods to transfer resources from one language to others, to augment data by rule-based generation, to check the consistency of hand-annotated corpora, and to pipe analyses into high-precision semantic back ends. This article gives an overview of the use of abstract syntax as interlingua through both established and emerging NLP applications involving GF

Text complexity and text simplification in the crisis management domain

Due to the fact that emergency situations can lead to substantial losses, both financial and in terms of human lives, it is essential that texts used in a crisis situation be clearly understandable. This thesis is concerned with the study of the complexity of the crisis management sub-language and with methods to produce new, clear texts and to rewrite pre-existing crisis management documents which are too complex to be understood. By doing this, this interdisciplinary study makes several contributions to the crisis management field. First, it contributes to the knowledge of the complexity of the texts used in the domain, by analysing the presence of a set of written language complexity issues derived from the psycholinguistic literature in a novel corpus of crisis management documents. Second, since the text complexity analysis shows that crisis management documents indeed exhibit high numbers of text complexity issues, the thesis adapts to the English language controlled language writing guidelines which, when applied to the crisis management language, reduce its complexity and ambiguity, leading to clear text documents. Third, since low quality of communication can have fatal consequences in emergency situations, the proposed controlled language guidelines and a set of texts which were re-written according to them are evaluated from multiple points of view. In order to achieve that, the thesis both applies existing evaluation approaches and develops new methods which are more appropriate for the task. These are used in two evaluation experiments – evaluation on extrinsic tasks and evaluation of users’ acceptability. The evaluations on extrinsic tasks (evaluating the impact of the controlled language on text complexity, reading comprehension under stress, manual translation, and machine translation tasks) Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management domain 4 show a positive impact of the controlled language on simplified documents and thus ensure the quality of the resource. The evaluation of users’ acceptability contributes additional findings about manual simplification and helps to determine directions for future implementation. The thesis also gives insight into reading comprehension, machine translation, and cross-language adaptability, and provides original contributions to machine translation, controlled languages, and natural language generation evaluation techniques, which make it valuable for several scientific fields, including Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and a number of different sub-fields of NLP.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Enhanced Realizability Interpretation for Program Extraction

This thesis presents Intuitionistic Fixed Point Logic (IFP), a schema for formal systems aimed to work with program extraction from proofs. IFP in its basic form allows proof construction based on natural deduction inference rules, extended by induction and coinduction. The corresponding system RIFP (IFP with realiz-ers) enables transforming logical proofs into programs utilizing the enhanced re-alizability interpretation. The theoretical research is put into practice in PRAWF1, a Haskell-based proof assistant for program extraction