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Integrating a Bottom–Up and Top–Down Methodology for Building Semantic Resources for the Multilingual Legal Domain

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Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6036))

Abstract

This article presents a methodology for multilingual legal knowledge acquisition and modelling. It encompasses two comlementary strategies. On the one hand, there is the top–down definition of the conceptual structure of the legal domain under consideration on the basis of expert jugdment. This structure is language–independent, modeled as an ontology, and can be aligned with other ontologies that capture similar or complementary knowledge, in order to provide a wider conceptual embedding. Another top–down approach is the exploitation of the explicit structure of legal texts, which enables the targeted identification of text spans that play an ontological role and their subsequent inclusion in the knowledge model.

On the other hand, the linguistically motivated, text-based bottom–up population and incremental refinement of this conceptual structure using (semi-)automatic NLP techniques, maximizes the completeness and domain-specificity of the resulting knowledge.

The proposed methodology is concerned with the relation between these two differently derived types of knowledge, and defines a framework for interfacing lexical and ontological knowledge, the result of which offers various perspectives on multilingual legal knowledge.

Two case-studies combining bottom-up and top-down methodologies for knowledge modelling and learning are presented as illustrations of the methodology.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques, CNR, Italy

    Enrico Francesconi & Daniela Tiscornia

  2. Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, CNR, Italy

    Simonetta Montemagni

  3. Natural Language Processing Research Group, University of Sheffield, UK

    Wim Peters

Authors
  1. Enrico Francesconi
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  2. Simonetta Montemagni
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  3. Wim Peters
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  4. Daniela Tiscornia
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Legal Information, Theory and Techniques, ITTIG-CNR, Via dei Barucci 20, 50127, Florence, Italy

    Enrico Francesconi  & Daniela Tiscornia  & 

  2. Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale "Antonio Zampolli" (ILC) - CNR, Area della Ricerca di Pisa,, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124, Pisa, Italy

    Simonetta Montemagni

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, S1 4DP, Sheffield, UK

    Wim Peters

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Francesconi, E., Montemagni, S., Peters, W., Tiscornia, D. (2010). Integrating a Bottom–Up and Top–Down Methodology for Building Semantic Resources for the Multilingual Legal Domain. In: Francesconi, E., Montemagni, S., Peters, W., Tiscornia, D. (eds) Semantic Processing of Legal Texts. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6036. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12837-0_6

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