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about 150 000 words organised in 115 000 synsets for 200 000 word-sense
pairs. the wordNet technology primarily aims at linguistic support. As concepts
are deined with natural language terms, no semantic deinitions exist in
a formal language. the deinitions remain vague from a legal point of view.
the motivation for the EurowordNet (EwN) ( 7 ) was the support of monoand
cross-lingual information retrieval. Based on the Princeton wordNet technology,
lexica for eight European languages were developed and connected by
an interlingual index (ILI) (Vossen, 1993). within the EwN, the structure of the
wordNet was supplemented with additional semantic–lexical relations and
three top-level categories. the top level offers 63 semantic distinctions grouped
into three types of entities. they can be accessed by the ILI and form together
the common semantic framework for all European languages. the work on
EwN was inished in 1999 but its framework has been continued by the Global
wordNet Association, which builds on the results of Princeton wordNet
and EwN and provides a worldwide platform for discussing, sharing and interconnecting
wordNets. A standard conversion of the Princeton wordNet to
RDf/OwL has been developed under the auspices of the w3C (wC3, 2006).
the main task of the EU-funded eContent LOIS project (Lexical Ontologies
for legal Information Sharing) was the building of a multilingual legal
wordNet for the purpose of facilitating legal information retrieval. this approach
faced the problem of lack of knowledge of a certain language that prevented
users from formulating queries, and thus from inding relevant results,
but also provided some support to lawyers having to cope with the EU’s linguistic
challenge of 23 oficial languages. Using this framework assured compatibility
of the LOIS wordNets with EwN, and allowed them to function as
an extension of EwN for the legal domain. ten partners from six European
countries (seven universities/research centres and three enterprises) participated
in this project. within the approved project duration of 24 months — 2004
to 2006, around 5 000 synsets were localised for each language involved. the
LOIS project primarily aimed at providing easy access to European legal databases
for legal experts as well as for lay people. further research was envisaged
on improved techniques for information retrieval, on providing document
standards (common XmL standard for the representation of legal documents),
on the commercial use of public-sector information, on showcase applications
( 7 ) the documentation is available at http://www.illc.uva.nl/EurowordNet/docs.html.
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