Towards Annotating and Extracting Textual Legal Case Elements

• Autore: Adam Wyner
• Carica: Research Associate at University of Liverpool, Department of Computer Science.
• Pagine: 173-183

Towards Annotating and Extracting

Textual Legal Case Elements

ADAM WYN ER∗

SUMM ARY:1. Introduction – 2. Background and Materials – 3. Methodology Using

GATE – 3.1. Gazetteer Lists – 3.2. JAPE Rules – 3.3. Results – 4. Conclusion

1. INT RODU CTI ON

In common law contexts, judges and juries decide a legal case to follow

previously decided cases (precedents) rather than legislation as in civil law

contexts1. The set of such cases is the legal case base. Legal professionals

must f‌ind, analyse, and reason with and about cases drawn from the case

base in the course of arguing for a decision in a current undecided case.

A range of elements of cases may be relevant to query and extract such as

the citation index, participants, locale, jurisdiction, representatives, judge,

prototypical fact patterns (factors), applicable law, and others. Commercial

providers of legal information allow legal professionals to search the case

base by keywords and meta data. However, the case base and search tools are

proprietary, of limited, non-extensible functionality, and are restricted ac-

cess. Moreover, no provider works with Semantic Web functionalities such

as ontologies or rich XML annotations, nor are natural language processing

techniques applied to the cases to support analysis to acquire information.

Text annotation of unstructured linguistic information is a signif‌icant,

diff‌icult aspect of the “knowledge bottleneck” in legal information process-

ing. In this paper, we apply natural language processing tools to textual

elements in cases, which are unstructured text, to produce annotated text,

from which information can be extracted, thus contributing to overcoming

the bottleneck. The extracted information can then be submitted to further

processes. Where the annotations are associated with an ontology2along

∗The Author is ResearchAssociate at University of Liverpool, Department of Computer

Science.

1Correspondence to Adam Wyner adam@wyner.info.

2A. WYNE R, R. HOE KSTR A,A Legal Case OWLOntology with an Inst antiation of Popov

v. Hayashi, in “Knowledge Engineering Review”,Vol. 14, 2010, n. 2, pp. 1-24.