Singling out Legal Knowledge from World Knowledge. An NLP-based Approach

• Autore: Francesca Bonin - Felice Dell'orletta - Giulia Venturi - Simonetta Montemagni
• Carica: Researchers at the Institute of Computational Linguistics 'Antonio Zampolli' of the CNR - Pisa.
• Pagine: 217-229

Singling out Legal Knowledge from World Knowledge.

An NLP-based Approach

FRAN CES CA BON IN, FELI CE DEL L’ORLET TA

GIUL IA VE NTU RI, SI MON ETTA MONT EM AGNI∗

SUMM ARY:1. Introduction – 2. Background and Motivation – 3. The Term Ex-

traction Approach – 4. Experiments and Results – 5. Evaluation – 5.1. General

Evaluation Criteria – 5.2. Discussion of Results – 6. Conclusion

1. INT RODU CTI ON

Scholars committed to modeling legal domain knowledgehave widely ac-

knowledged with the need for domain-specif‌ic knowledge organization, i.e.

legal ontologies, where domain knowledge (legal knowledge) and knowledge

of domains of interest to be regulated (referred to as world knowledge) are

not mixed. However, as pointed out in Breuker and Hoekstra1, the indis-

criminate mixture of the two types of knowledge is a common attitude in

constructing legal ontologies. In particular, Breuker and colleagues speak

of epistemological promiscuity, putting the emphasis on how this is a serious

problem in core ontology development. They point out that many legal on-

tologies collapse together epistemological and ontological perspectives. Start-

ing from the well-known assumptionthat “by its very nature, law deals with

behaviour in the world”, they discuss how domain independent concepts

of law are tained with common-sense notions which refer to social activi-

ties. Interestingly, they claim that “the domain ontologies [they]developed

in the various project contained almost ninety-nine percent terms that be-

longed to the category ‘world knowledge’, i.e. the world the legal domain is

about”. On the contrary, a core ontology should exclusively include “typical

∗The Authors are Researchers at the Institute of Computational Linguistics “Antonio

Zampolli” of the CNR - Pisa. The research reported in the paper has been partly sup-

ported by the Italian FIRB project “Piattaforma di servizi integrati per l’Accesso semantico

e plurilingue ai contenuti culturali italiani nel web”. The Authors would like to thank An-

gela D’Angelo of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa and Paolo Plini of the Institute of

Atmospheric Pollution, Environmental Terminology Unit (CNR, Rome) who contributed

as domain experts to the evaluation process.

1J. BREU KER, R. HO EKST RA,Epistemology and Ontology in Core Ontologies: FOLaw

and LRI-Core, Two Core Ontologies for Law, in “Proceedingsof the Workshop on Core On-

tologies in Ontology Engineering” (EKAW04), Northamptonshire, UK, 2004, pp. 15-27.