YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

WORKSHOP
for test and demonstration purposes, and on product placement for integration
of the result into commercial applications (Dini et al., 2005).
Automatic text analysis and conceptual indexing provides support in two
areas: inding concepts based on corpora-based analysis or linking text corpora
to knowledge bases (see for example the following projects: Konterm (Schweighofer,
1999, Schweighofer et al., 2002), Salomon (moens et al., 1997),
flexicon (Smith et al., 1995), SmILE (Brüninghaus and Ashley, 2001), SUm
(hachey and Grover, 2004) or Support Vector machines (Gonçalves and
quaresma, 2005)). Existing techniques — tfxIDf vector document representation
and feature extraction — have proven their feasibility and potential to
structure, classify and describe (label) huge amounts of legal text corpora, in
particular if intellectual improvement is done. however, scaling-up — for example,
deeper investigation of a larger text corpus and use of a more advanced
ontology — has still to be done.
On the one hand, ontologies may offer a solution for structuring of extracted
information. Legal databases could be transformed into a semantic representation
by semi-automatic means, into logical sentences or as process diagrams,
conceptual structures or relationships (e.g. AustLII ( 8 ), CiteSeer ( 9 ). this
semantic representation would not be perfect but would provide signiicantly
easier access to the legal database.
On the other hand, semi-automatic lexical analysis provides invaluable support
for word sense disambiguation or deinitions. In the LOIS project, this tool
was used for extracting multilingual deinitions from the EUR-Lex database.
LEGAL ONtOLOGIES
After important preliminary work (e.g. mcCarty, 1989; hafner, 1977; or
Stamper, 1991), the frame-based ontology fBO of van Kralingen (1995) and
Visser (1995) and the functional ontology fOLaw of Valente (1995) achieved
some prominence. Both were formalised with the description language Ontolingua
(Gruber, 1993) and represent a rather epistemic approach.
the fBO was conceived as a general and reusable legal ontology, which
offered three classes of model primitives, whereby for each unit a frame structure
with all relevant attributes was deined. the types of frames were norm,
action and concept.
( 8 ) website: http://www.austlii.edu.au/.
( 9 ) website: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cs.
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