As part of the 21st Century Law Practice Summer London Law Program, I had the opportunity to present a class on Topics in Natural Language Processing of Legal Texts. My thanks to Dan Katz for organising this and to the class for their interest.
Dan, co-organiser Renee Knake at Michigan State University, and their colleagues at the University of Westminster are up to good things in law and technology – well worth watching.
To cap off the Law Program, the summer program organised a Law Tech Camp of short and TED style presentations on topics. It is an excellent program of talks from members of the legal industry, practicing lawyers, and academics. I have a talk about Crowdsourcing Legal Text Annotation, which is also discussed in a previous post. The talks are videotaped and made available online (TBA).
Shortlink to this page.
By Adam Wyner
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Month: June 2012
Papers at the Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts (SPLeT 2012)
Two short papers appear in the proceedings of LREC Workshop on SPLeT 2012 – Semantic Processing of Legal Texts. The papers are available on the links.
Problems and Prospects in the Automatic Semantic Analysis of Legal Texts – A Position Paper
Adam Wyner
Abstract
Legislation and regulations are expressed in natural language. Machine-readable forms of the texts may be represented as linked documents, semantically tagged text, or translation to a logic. The paper considers the latter form, which is key to testing consistency of laws, drawing inferences, and providing explanations relative to input. To translate laws to a machine-readable logic, sentences must be parsed and semantically translated. Manual translation is time and labour intensive, usually involving narrowly scoping the rules. While automated translation systems have made significant progress, problems remain. The paper outlines systems to automatically translate legislative clauses to a semantic representation, highlighting key problems and proposing some tasks to address them.
Semantic Annotations for Legal Text Processing using GATE Teamware
Adam Wyner and Wim Peters
Abstract
Large corpora of legal texts are increasing available in the public domain. To make them amenable for automated text processing, various sorts of annotations must be added. We consider semantic annotations bearing on the content of the texts – legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. Adding annotations and developing gold standard corpora (to verify rule-based or machine learning algorithms) is costly in terms of time, expertise, and cost. To make the processes efficient, we propose several instances of GATE’s Teamware to support annotation tasks for legal rules, case factors, and case decision elements. We engage annotation volunteers (law school students and legal professionals). The reports on the tasks are to be presented at the workshop.
Shortlink to this page.
By Adam Wyner
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.