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. 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

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

The ParlaMint corpora of parliamentary proceedings

This paper presents the ParlaMint corpora containing transcriptions of the sessions of the 17 European national parliaments with half a billion words. The corpora are uniformly encoded, contain rich meta-data about 11 thousand speakers, and are linguistically annotated following the Universal Dependencies formalism and with named entities. Samples of the corpora and conversion scripts are available from the project’s GitHub repository, and the complete corpora are openly available via the CLARIN.SI repository for download, as well as through the NoSketch Engine and KonText concordancers and the Parlameter interface for on-line exploration and analysis

The Power Laws of the Italian Constitutional Court, and Their Relevance for Legal Scholars

<p>This fileset contains figures and tables discussed throughout the paper "The Power Laws of the Italian Constitutional Court, and Their Relevance for Legal Scholars" submitted to JURIX 2015, the 28th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.</p> <p> </p

EXTRACTING NORMATIVE CONTENT FROM LEGAL TEXTS

Interoperability is a crucial issue, as large scale applications mainly depend on the possibility of mapping and connecting different models and structures. In the context of public services organization, achieving interoperability among public sector information means, on the one hand (back office), enabling dialogue among public offices, sharing data, standardising structures and models, connecting data producers and final users. On the other hand (front office), it means, providing better services and making citizens communicate and understand administrative and legal content. Due to the social dimension of legal information, semantic interoperability in the regulative domain is of crucial relevance, but of great complexity. Connecting regulative data requires the alignment of the structural layers, by adopting Semantic Web Standards, enabling data and meta-data to be identified, combined and retrieved, but also interconnection at conceptual level, allowingdeeper communication of legal knowledge across domains and languages. The subject of this article concerns the conceptual modelling of legal information in systems for the organisation of digital services by administration and businesses and for assessing their normative compliance. This is a field in growing evolution and of great interest both from the market and public perspective, where several projects, tools and languages have been implemented, but the knowledge bottleneck in extracting and representing normative content from legal texts has not yet found a suitable solution, able to make the process of formalisation computationally tractable and reliable. The methodological aim is to show how the ontology-based approach, constructed around the basic notion of \u27obligation\u27, could support the formalisation of rules from texts and, at the same time, provide the reference model where to ground the mapping process between rules extracted from a normative statement and the business mode

Towards ECLI 2.0

The European Case Law Identifier (ECLI) was established in 2010. It has been implemented by three European courts and (partly or in full) by twelve Member States, while eight Member States are preparing an implementation. During these implementations various issues concerning the format, metadata and the architecture of ECLI have surfaced, while in the meantime technological insights have progressed. To improve the accessibility of current and future case law repositories an ECLI 2.0 needs to be considered. Given the implementations realized, backwards compatibility is an absolute prerequisite. In this paper the various issues and possible solutions are discussed

Annotation schema for legal doctrine: a case study on DoGi database

Interoperability today is the key term for the enhancement of databases published on the web: the data, when isolated, have little value, on the contrary, their value increases significantly when different datasets, produced and published independently by different providers, can be reused and freely mashed by third parties. The use of data for new purposes not foreseen by organizations and individuals who publish "raw data" is one of the advantages of linked open data model. To achieve these benefits content and relationships between the entities described in the dataset should be explicitly represented in standard web formats (XML, RDF, URI). The DoGi-Legal Literature database, one of the most valuable sources for online access to legal doctrine, created and managed by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the CNR is following this direction. This paper will define the schema of the data representing the database in RDF format. This will make the DoGi database interoperable between different data and service providers (libraries, publishers, information services for accessing national and European legal information), allowing the creation of new advanced services to be made available on the web of data. In particular, the contribution will focus on the goal to promote semantic interoperability between the DoGi classification schema and other semantic indexing tools in legal domain