DALOS - DrAfting Legislation with Ontology-based Support

Transcription

1 eparticipation Joint Projects Review Meeting DALOS - DrAfting Legislation with Ontology-based Support T. Agnoloni, L. Bacci, L. Dini, E. Francesconi, D. Tiscornia CNR-ITTIG Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell' Informazione Giuridica CELI Italy eparticipation Joint Projects Review Meeting Brussels, December 6 th, 2007

2 Overview Objectives of the project; Impact and benets of this action Technical contents and current outcomes; Dissemination activities; Prototypical applications: the case study on consumer law (CNR) discovering the European Constitution (CELI)

3 Objectives The goal to improve the quality of legislative language; to facilitate legal experts and citizens in accessing legislation to support the transfer of European Directives into national laws. The service a linguistic and knowledge management tool to be used in the legislative processes, in particular in the phase of legislative drafting.

4 Impact and benets of the action For law-makers ability to use the more appropriate words, and to produce a text corresponding to the intention of the legislator in a multilingual environment, coherence maintenance among the dierent linguistic versions of the same text shared understanding of legal terminology during the discussion concerning legislative proposals For citizens a more precise retrieval of relevant legal documents to enhance accessibility of legal documents

5 Outcomes Providing legislative drafters with a multilingual terminology extracted from a regulated domain and its ontological characterization easy access to the pertinent ontological resources navigation through the network of relevant legal terms (and contexts) Integrating ontological tools within the legislative process for: Lexical controls in the drafting activities (direct goal) Indexing, retrieval of legislation (indirect goal)

6 Technical contents: the methodology The ontology-based legal lexicon is: context-based (bottom-up strategy for term extraction) developed to ensure coherence, interoperability and harmonization of legislation integrated within the legislative drafting process The `ontological characterisation of the legal language' allows: explicit representation of the conceptual meaning of the multilingual lexical units formalized relations among concepts a shared understanding, negotiation and evolution of meaning of legal concepts.

7 The Consortium: Technical/Academic Partners The Italian National Research Council: Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG-CNR) Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (CNR-ILC) Department of Computer Science - University of Sheeld (USFD) The Leibniz Center for Law University of Amsterdam (UvA) CELI European University Institute (EUI) Institute of Law and Technology, Univ. Barcelona (IDTUAB) Leiden University (UNILEIDEN)

8 The Consortium: Institutional Partners Italian Parliament: Camera dei Deputati (CAMERA) Senato della Repubblica (SENATO) Centro Nazionale per l'informatica nella Pubblica Amministrazione (CNIPA) Further institutional bodies will be involved in testing the service in: Italy (local PAs) The Netherlands Spain

9 General tasks allocation Technical partners: to develop the service; Academic partners: to dene and validate a legal lexicon; Institutional partners: to provide specications and to test the system;

10 Dissemination activities Jurix Workshop on International Cooperation for Better Legislation and Public Participation (Paris, 9th December 2006); IST-Africa 2007, Mozambique LOAIT Workshop Legal Ontologies and Articial Intelligence Techniques (Palo Alto, CA, June 4th, 2007, ICAIL) Workshop on quality of legislation and ICT (The Hague, July 12th 2007) Jurix 2007 (Leiden, December 13-14th, 2007) Computable Models of the Law Legal Ontologies and Semantic Web

11 Technical contents: next steps extension to Spanish and Dutch terminology renement of the ontology learning tool consolidation of the domain ontology validation by Institutional partners and feed back on the law-making environment implementation of an access service to the semantic resources denition of a methodology for updating and for consistency checking

12 Term extraction: some gures the Consumer Law corpus: 16 directives (original version: 9; consolidated texts: 7) 42 judgements (Court of Justice: 33, C. of First Instance: 9) 8,192 contexts (text partitions) 292,609 word tokens terms selection 1,437 Italian terms selected (frequency 5), 590 extracted Hyponomic relations and 1,236 related terms 3017 English terms 118 Italian/English terms

13 The Domain Ontology

14 DALOS - Drafting Application Prototype

15 Introduction The knowledge resource produced within the Dalos project can be exploited in several kind of applications (provided in standard format RDF/OWL) Dalos knowledge can be used inside a legislative editor providing drafting support for the production of annotated (marked-up) documents on a specic domain top-down design of the Norm: from Legal Concepts to Legal Terms

16 Basic Features Access to a knowledge resource shared and approved by legal experts Search for domain terms through lexical forms or ontology browsing Links to external document fragments (contexts) where terms are dened or mentioned Multi-language view of term details Insertion of domain terms while editing document

17 Tools xmlegeseditor Opensource Legislative editor Developed at ITTIG-CNR Jena Knowledge Base Management HP Labs

18 xmlegeseditor - DALOS version

19 Browsing the Ontology Term searching through the ontology One term can be classied under more classes (plurality of semantic paths)

20 Searching Terms Search of terms according to their lexical forms (Contains, Starts with, Ends with, Exact match) Highlight of dened terms

21 Details and Source Panels details on term denition link to context lexical variants links to documents where term has been used document fragment

22 Semantic Properties Panel Semantic relations of a term with other terms (in the specic domain) derived from the ontological classication

23 Lexical Properties Panel Linguistic relations of a term with other terms derived from the lexicon using NLP tools hyponymy hyperonymy related terms (WN 'fuzzynym' relation)

24 Multi-language support Two types of multilingual support: global: selection of the language in which terms appear local: translation of the selected term and related relations and properties

25 Term insertion within documents Terms from the linguistic resource can be inserted in the text according to a chosen lexical variant

26 Editing environment Marked terms properties can be highlighted (visualization of ontological and lexical relations, contexts (linked sources) using dierent languages)

27 Conclusions and future work Customization of knowledge resource with local information that can join the ocial resource Indexing and searching using key-terms Rules, reasoning and high level queries Automatic mark-up of plain documents Future perspective: in conjunction with an ontological description of legal texts, to consider legal drafting as the main activity to build legal ontologies