This paper is concerned with the goal of maintaining legal information and compliance systems: the ‘resource consumption bottleneck’ of creating semantic technologies manually. The use of automated information extraction techniques could significantly reduce this bottleneck. The research question of this paper is: How to address the resource bottleneck problem of creating specialist knowledge management systems? In particular, how to semi-automate the extraction of norms and their elements to populate legal ontologies? This paper shows that the acquisition paradox can be addressed by combining state-of-the-art general-purpose NLP modules with pre- and post-processing using rules based on domain knowledge. It describes a Semantic Role Labeling based information extraction system to extract norms from legislation and represent them as structured norms in legal ontologies. The output is intended to help make laws more accessible, understandable, and searchable in legal document management systems such as Eunomos (Boella et al., 2016).

WordNet represents a cornerstone in the Computational Linguistics field, linking words to meanings (or senses) through a taxonomical representation of synsets, i.e., clusters of words with an equivalent meaning in a specific context often described by few definitions (or glosses) and examples. Most of the approaches to the Word Sense Disambiguation task fully rely on these short texts as a source of contextual information to match with the input text to disambiguate. This paper presents the first attempt to enrich synsets data with common-sense definitions, automatically retrieved from ConceptNet 5, and disambiguated accordingly to WordNet. The aim was to exploit the shared- and immediate-thinking nature of common-sense knowledge to extend the short but incredibly useful contextual information of the synsets. A manual evaluation on a subset of the entire result (which counts a total of almost 600K synset enrichments) shows a very high precision with an estimated good recall.

In this paper we first introduce the working context related to the understanding of an heterogeneous network of references contained in the Italian regulatory framework. We then present an extended analysis of a large network of laws, providing several types of analytical evaluation that can be used within a legal management system for understanding the data through summarization, visualization, and browsing. In the legal domain, yet several tasks are strictly supervised by humans, with strong consumption of time and energy that would dramatically drop with the help of automatic or semi-automatic supporting tools. We overview different techniques and methodologies explaining how they can be helpful in actual scenarios.

In this paper, we describe how NLP can semi-automate the construction and analysis of knowledge in Eunomos, a legal knowledge management service which enables users to view legislation from various sources and find the right definitions and explanations of legal concepts in a given context. NLP can semi-automate some routine tasks currently performed by knowledge engineers, such as classifying norm, or linking key terms within legislation to ontological concepts. This helps overcome the resource bottleneck problem of creating specialist knowledge management systems. While accuracy is of the utmost importance in the legal domain, and the information should be verified by domain experts as a matter of course, a semi-automated approach can result in considerable efficiency gains.

This paper introduces a number theoretical and practical issues related to the “Syllabus”. Syllabusis a multi-lingua ontology based tool, designed to improve the applications of the European Directives in the various European countries.