This paper gives an overview of recent developments in the German Reference Corpus DRK in terms of growth, maximising relevant corpus strata, metadata, legal issues, and its current and future research interface. Due to the recent acquisition of new licenses, DRK has grown by a factor of four in the first half of 2014, mostly in the area of newspaper text, and presently contains over 24 b...

We have carried out a series of coverage evaluations of diverse types of parsers using texts from several genres such as newspaper, religious, legal and biomedical texts. We compared the overall coverage of the evaluated parsers and analyzed the differences by text genre. The results indicate that the coverage typically drops several percentage points when parsers are faced with texts on genres...

Although technical terms often represent unambiguous meanings, the crucial expression �emptiness' in Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions is likely to serve a soteriological function. The doctrine of emptiness seems to be intended to detach our linguistic expression from the unwholesome influence of illusory assumptions; assumptions of which we are not aware in our referential acts. Buddhist texts ofte...

In this paper we illustrate an approach to information extraction from legal texts using SALEM. SALEM is an NLP architecture for semantic annotation and indexing of Italian legislative texts, developed by ILC in close collaboration with ITTIG-CNR, Florence. Results of SALEM performance on a test sample of about 500 Italian law paragraphs are provided.

Most large text-understanding systems have been designed under the assumption that the input text will be in reasonably "neat" form, e.g., newspaper stories and other edited texts. However, a great deal of natural language texts e.g.~ memos, rough drafts, conversation transcripts~ etc., have features that differ significantly from "neat" texts, posing special problems for readers, such as missp...

In this paper, we address the problems caused by changes in the regulations on the legal corpus and its calculative implementations. From the ontology of law suggested by R. van Kralingen, we construct a generic document structure, which renders explicit the semantics of legal documents. These are represented in a sufficiently fine and rigorous way to link together documents belonging to distin...

Most work in NLP requires that texts have been previously segmented into sentences and words. Segmenting a text into sentences and words, however, is a complex task, due to the ambiguity of many punctuation marks and spaces. Furthermore, Web texts such as HTML documents are more difficult to make into well refined and segmented texts because they are described in a more free style, with many se...

In law as well as in linguistics researchers work with texts. In recent years both disciplines are turning away from the introspective approach to a more empirical, evidence-based practice. Digital sources and programmes for statistical analyses of mass data have become increasingly available and offer new opportunities for linguistic research. In law and legal linguistics a growing number of r...