Controlled Legal German (CLG) is a subset of legal German specifically designed to facilitate the semantic processing of Swiss statutes and regulations. In this paper, we describe the strategies CLG employs to reduce ambiguity and underspecification in such texts, and the methods it uses to maintain proximity to conventional legal language. The presented discussion suggests that, if existing sy...

In this paper we propose a large case-based reasoner for the legal domain. Analyzing legal texts for indexing purposes makes the implementation of large case bases a complex task. We present a methodology to automatically convert legal texts into legal cases guided by domain expert knowledge in a rule-based system with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. This methodology can be genera...

Purpose – In this paper we describe the process of developing and implementing a knowledge management system for the Spanish judicial domain. Spanish judges, especially newly-recruited ones, hold a solid background of theoretical legal knowledge, but are much less familiar with the judicial knowledge of the more senior judges acquired from everyday practice and case resolution. The aim of this ...

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 c...

Information extraction from legal documents is an important and open problem. A mixed approach, using linguistic information and machine learning techniques, is described in this paper. In this approach, top-level legal concepts are identified and used for document classification using Support Vector Machines. Named entities, such as, locations, organizations, dates, and document references, ar...

Knowledge acquisition constitutes the bottleneck for the creation of legal expert systems. A certain degree of formalism of legal language is an inevitable prerequisite. Our prototype KONTERM deals with that problem by supporting the process of creating a selective thesaurus for a legal information system which can be used for automatic indexing and document classification. This selectivity is ...