Skip to main content

Identification and Visualization of Legal Definitions and Legal Term Relations

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Conceptual Modeling (ER 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14319))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Reading, analyzing, and implementing regulatory documents are cumbersome and still mostly manual tasks. The constantly increasing amount of regulatory documents causes an equally increasing need for supporting those tasks through information systems. One key aspect for accomplishing those tasks is to acquire knowledge of the different legal definitions, i.e., legal terms accompanied by their explanations, in order to build a legal vocabulary or an ontology. This paper proposes an approach taking European regulations as input and i) automatically extracting legal definitions, ii) determining semantic relations such as hyponyms, meronyms, and synonyms between legal terms, and iii) visualizing the results in form of a knowledge graph and statistics. The approach is evaluated on European regulations and made accessible particularly for non-technical users through an easy-to-use web service.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 74.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://eur-lex.europa.eu.

  2. 2.

    https://wordnet.princeton.edu/.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/AnastasiyaDmrsk/Legal-Definitions-and-their-Relations.

References

  1. Al-Talib, G.A., Atiyah, A.A.: Extraction and classification of semantic relations from news recommendation. In: International Congress on Human-Computer Interaction, Optimization and Robotic Applications (2022). https://doi.org/10.1109/HORA55278.2022.9799885

  2. Amaludin, B., Wardika, F.R., Putra, P.J.M., Paramartha, I.G.Y.: Analyze the usage of legal definitions in Indonesian regulation using text mining case study: treasury and budget law. In: Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (2021). https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA210324

  3. Avram, A., Cercel, D., Chiru, C.: UPB at SemEval-2020 task 6: pretrained language models for definition extraction. In: Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2020). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.semeval-1.97

  4. Commission, E., service, L.: Joint practical guide of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission for persons involved in the drafting of European Union legislation. Publications Office of the European Union (2016). https://doi.org/10.2880/5575

  5. Cruse, D.A.: Hyponymy and its varieties. Semant. Relationsh. Interdiscip. Perspect. (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0073-3_1

  6. Culy, C., Chiocchetti, E., Ralli, N.: Visualizing conceptual relations in legal terminology. In: International Conference on Information Visualisation (2013). https://doi.org/10.1109/IV.2013.42

  7. Damaratskaya, A.: Identification and Visualization of Legal Definitions and their Relations Based on European Regulatory Documents. Bachelor’s thesis, Technical University Munich, May 2023. https://mediatum.ub.tum.de/doc/1715461/document.pdf

  8. European Parl., Council of the EU: Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council. https://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj

  9. European Parl., Council of the EU: Regulation (EU) 2019/1241 of the European Parliament and of the Council. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2019/1241/oj

  10. European Parl., Council of the EU: Regulation (EU) 2020/740 of the European Parliament and of the Council. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2020/740/oj

  11. European Parl., Council of the EU: Regulation (EU) 2021/947 of the European Parliament and of the Council. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2021/947/oj

  12. Ferneda, E., do Prado, H.A., Batista, A.H., Pinheiro, M.S.: Extracting definitions from Brazilian legal texts. In: Murgante, B., et al. (eds.) ICCSA 2012. LNCS, vol. 7335, pp. 631–646. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31137-6_48

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Ferrara, A., Picascia, S., Riva, D.: Context-aware knowledge extraction from legal documents through zero-shot classification. In: Guizzardi, R., Neumayr, B. (eds.) Advances in Conceptual Modeling. ER 2022. LNCS, vol. 13650, pp. 81–90. Springer, Cham (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22036-4_8

  14. Hippisley, A., Cheng, D., Ahmad, K.: The head-modifier principle and multilingual term extraction. Nat. Lang. Eng. 11(2), 129–157 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1351324904003535

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Hwang, R.H., Hsueh, Y.L., Chang, Y.T.: Building a Taiwan law ontology based on automatic legal definition extraction. Appl. Syst. Innov. (2018). https://doi.org/10.3390/asi1030022

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Khoo, C.S., Na, J.C.: Semantic relations in information science. Annu. Rev. Inf. Sci. Technol. (2006). https://doi.org/10.1002/aris.1440400112

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. de Maat, E., Winkels, R.: Automated classification of norms in sources of law. In: Francesconi, E., Montemagni, S., Peters, W., Tiscornia, D. (eds.) Semantic Processing of Legal Texts. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 6036, pp. 170–191. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12837-0_10

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  18. Nakamura, M., Ogawa, Y., Toyama, K.: Extraction of legal definitions and their explanations with accessible citations. In: Casanovas, P., Pagallo, U., Palmirani, M., Sartor, G. (eds.) AICOL -2013. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 8929, pp. 157–171. Springer, Heidelberg (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45960-7_12

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Nakamura, M., Ogawa, Y., Toyama, K.: Extraction of legal definitions from a Japanese statutory corpus-toward construction of a legal term ontology. In: Law via the Internet Conference (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Sartor, G., Santin, P., Audrito, D., Sulis, E., Caro, L.D.: Automated extraction and representation of citation network: a CJEU case-study. In: Guizzardi, R., Neumayr, B. (eds.) Advances in Conceptual Modeling. ER 2022. LNCS, vol. 13650, pp. 102–111. Springer, Cham (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22036-4_10

  21. Singh, A., Kumar, P., Sinha, A.: DSC IIT-ISM at semeval-2020 task 6: boosting BERT with dependencies for definition extraction. In: Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2020). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.semeval-1.93

  22. Waltl, B., et al.: Automated extraction of semantic information from German legal documents (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Winkels, R., Hoekstra, R.: Automatic extraction of legal concepts and definitions. In: Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (2012). https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-167-0-157

  24. Winter, K., Gall, M., Rinderle-Ma, S.: Regminer: taming the complexity of regulatory documents for digitalized compliance management. In: Proceedings of the Best Dissertation Award, Doctoral Consortium, and Demonstration & Resources Track at BPM. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 2673, pp. 112–116. CEUR-WS.org (2020). https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2673/paperDR10.pdf

  25. Winter, K., Rinderle-Ma, S.: Untangling the GDPR using conrelminer. CoRR (2018). http://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03399

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Catherine Sai .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Sai, C., Damaratskaya, A., Winter, K., Rinderle-Ma, S. (2023). Identification and Visualization of Legal Definitions and Legal Term Relations. In: Sales, T.P., Araújo, J., Borbinha, J., Guizzardi, G. (eds) Advances in Conceptual Modeling. ER 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14319. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47112-4_14

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47112-4_14

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-47111-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-47112-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics