Multilingual extraction and editing of concept strings for the legal domain

Identifying semantic expressions (so-called concept strings (CSs)) in multilingual corpora is an important NLP task, as it allows web search engines to define and perform semantic queries over large collection of documents. Existing web search engines in the legal domain are mainly limited to keyword search, in which the query word is matched against the textual content of the documents. This paper presents a novel framework named the Concept Strings Framework that makes use of CSs for representing the content of the documents, and for allowing semantic search over them. These CSs can consist of individual knowledge base (KB) concepts (e.g. WordNet concepts) or combination of them. In addition, this paper presents an interactive web-based toolkit, called the Template Editor that enables the creation, editing and evaluation of CSs. Experiments on two publicly available legislation websites show satisfactory