Marcello Ceci - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Marcello Ceci

This paper presents a visualization technique to assist legal experts in formalising their interp... more This paper presents a visualization technique to assist legal experts in formalising their interpretation of legal texts in terms of regulatory requirements. (Semi-)automation of compliance processes requires a machine-readable version of legal requirements in a format that enables effective compliance assessment. The use of a semi-structured controlled natural language as an intermediate step of the translation from a human-readable text to a machine-readable and understandable format ensures that the process of interpretation of those requirements is as simple as possible. However, it does not ensure that the formal representation resulting from the interpretation faithfully represents the intended semantics provided by the legal expert. Visualization techniques such as property graphs in Neo4j could fill this gap, allowing legal experts to understand and control the formal representation of the result of their act of interpretation.

Abstract. This paper presents an application of the Carneades Argumentation System to case-law. T... more Abstract. This paper presents an application of the Carneades Argumentation System to case-law. The application relies on a set of ontologies – representing the core and domain concepts of a restricted legal field, the law of contracts – and a collection of precedents taken from Italian courts of different grades. The knowledge base represents the starting point for the construction of rules representing laws and precedents which, in turn, are responsible for the argumentative reasoning. The system reconstructs the legal interpretations performed by the judge, presenting its reasoning path and suggesting possible different or divergent interpretation in the light of relevant code- and case-law.

The continuous increase in quantity and depth of regulation following the financial crisis has le... more The continuous increase in quantity and depth of regulation following the financial crisis has left the financial industry in dire need of making its compliance assessment activities more effective. The field of AI & Law provides models that, despite being fit for the representation of semantics of requirements, do not share the approach favoured by the industry which relies on business vocabularies such as SBVR. This paper presents Mercury, a solution for representing the requirements and vocabulary contained in a regulatory text (or business policy) in a SME-friendly way, for the purpose of determining compliance. Mercury includes a structured language based on SBVR, with a rulebook, containing the regulative and constitutive rules, and a vocabulary, containing the actions and factors that determine a rule’s applicability and its legal effect. Mercury includes an XML persistence model and is mapped to an OWL ontology called FIRO, enabling semantic applications.

2019 IEEE 27th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2019

Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search so... more Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search solutions offered by present-day legal portals are targeted primarily at legal professionals. These solutions are not adequate for requirements analysts whose objective is to extract domain knowledge including stakeholders, rights and duties, and business processes that are relevant to legal requirements. Semantic Web technologies now enable smart search capabilities and can be exploited to help requirements analysts in elaborating legal requirements. In our previous work, we developed an automated framework for extracting semantic metadata from legal texts. In this paper, we investigate the use of our metadata extraction framework as an enabler for smart legal search with a focus on requirements engineering activities. We report on our industrial experience helping the Government of Luxembourg provide an advanced search facility over Luxembourg's Income Tax Law. The experience shows that semantic legal metadata can be successfully exploited for answering requirements engineering-related legal queries. Our results also suggest that our conceptualization of semantic legal metadata can be further improved with new information elements and relations.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016

The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is a specification created by the ... more The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is a specification created by the Object Management Group (OMG) to provide a way to semantically describe business concepts and specify business rules. However, reasoning with SBVR is still an open subject, and current efforts to provide reasoning are done through the Web Ontology Language (OWL), by providing a mapping between SBVR and OWL. In this paper we focus on the problem of mapping SBVR vocabulary and rulebook to OWL 2, but unlike previous mappings described in the literature, we provide a novel and unorthodox mapping that allows to describe legal rules which have their own intricate anatomy.

Law and Philosophy Library, 2014

ABSTRACT The present paper represents an effort towards the acquisition of an acknowledged standa... more ABSTRACT The present paper represents an effort towards the acquisition of an acknowledged standard for the rule and logics layer of the semantic web stack of technologies. It is part of a broader research trying to improve the state-of-the-art of legal knowledge representation by facing its main issues: the gap between document representation and rule modeling, and the need for a shared standard in the logic layer to represent legal reasoning. The paper focuses on the upper part of the semantic web stack, namely the rules and logics layers: here, the Carneades Argumentation System supports the reproduction of judicial argumentation through a ruleset and a knowledge base imported from an OWL/RDF ontology. Being based upon the theories of argumentation developed by T. Gordon and D. Walton, Carneades supports argumentation schemes and uses them as templates while instantiating rules, ontology and cases into argument graphs. We argue that using argument schemes is the only viable choice to represent legal reasoning properly, and for this purpose, the concept of argument scheme should include templates that represent procedural aspects of legal processes, such as the acts available to the parties during a court trial. Even if emerging standards in rule representation (such as LegalRuleML) overcome many of the limitations of precedent languages, they lack a complete model of the argumentation process. This, as the paper tries to demonstrate, prevents the representation of legal arguments in their procedural aspects and in those aspects related to patterns and tasks of argumentation, hindering its capability to perform a correct evaluation of the acceptability of legal arguments. In order to support that claim, two examples are provided. The concluding remarks broaden the perspective to include the general need for a standard in legal reasoning engines.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

ABSTRACT This paper presents part of a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, aimed at a... more ABSTRACT This paper presents part of a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, aimed at achieving a strong text-to-knowledge morphism between legal text and legal concepts by filling the gap between the semantics of judicial documents and the syntax of legal norms. The research relies on the previous efforts of the community in the field of legal knowledge representation and rule interchange for applications in the legal domain, and tries to apply those theoretical models to a set of real legal documents. The aim is to formalize the legal concepts and the argumentation patterns contained in a judgement, as expressed by the judicial text. The bases of the framework are a set of metadata associated with judicial concepts and an ontology library, combining the features of OWL2 and description logics to provide a semantically powerful representation of case-law and a solid ground for an argumentation system based on defeasible rules. The present paper shortly presents the metadata and ontology layers, focusing on the rules and argumentation layers. In the example provided, an application of the Carneades Argumentation System, the framework reconstructs the legal interpretations performed by the judge in a specific judicial decision, presenting its reasoning path, and suggesting possible different interpretations in the light of relevant code-and case-law.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

ABSTRACT The paper shows how to model judgments starting from the text and capturing not only the... more ABSTRACT The paper shows how to model judgments starting from the text and capturing not only the structural parts, but also the basic arguments used by the judge to reach its conclusions. We have also included a qualification of citations following the Shepard's method. The goal of this approach is to build a complete ontology framework capable of detecting and modelling knowledge directly from the judgment's text, providing the basic metadata to the logic and reasoning layers.

Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2017

The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, b... more The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, by using knowledge extracted from text, metadata, and rules, while maintaining a strong text-to-knowledge morphism between legal text and legal concepts, in order to fill the gap between legal document and its semantics. The framework is composed of four different models that make use of standard languages from the Semantic Web stack of technologies: a document metadata structure, modelling the main parts of a judgement, and creating a bridge between a text and its semantic annotations of legal concepts; a legal core ontology, modelling abstract legal concepts and institutions contained in a rule of law; a legal domain ontology, modelling the main legal concepts in a specific domain concerned by case-law; an argumentation system, modelling the structure of argumentation. The input to the framework includes metadata associated with judicial concepts, and an ontology library representing th...

Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search so... more Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search solutions offered by present-day legal portals are targeted primarily at legal professionals. These solutions are not adequate for requirements analysts whose objective is to extract domain knowledge including stakeholders, rights and duties, and business processes that are relevant to legal requirements. Semantic Web technologies now enable smart search capabilities and can be exploited to help requirements analysts in elaborating legal requirements. In our previous work, we developed an automated framework for extracting semantic metadata from legal texts. In this paper, we investigate the use of our metadata extraction framework as an enabler for smart legal search with a focus on requirements engineering activities. We report on our industrial experience helping the Government of Luxembourg provide an advanced search facility over Luxembourg’s Income Tax Law. The experience shows that ...

The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, b... more The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, by using knowledge extracted from text, metadata, and rules, while maintaining a strong text-to-knowledge morphism between legal text and legal concepts, in order to fill the gap between legal document and its semantics. The framework is composed of four different models that make use of standard languages from the Semantic Web stack of technologies: a document metadata structure, modelling the main parts of a judgement, and creating a bridge between a text and its semantic annotations of legal concepts; a legal core ontology, modelling abstract legal concepts and institutions contained in a rule of law; a legal domain ontology, modelling the main legal concepts in a specific domain concerned by case-law; an argumentation system, modelling the structure of argumentation. The input to the framework includes metadata associated with judicial concepts, and an ontology library representing th...

This research aims to define an integrated methodology for modelling judgments, starting from leg... more This research aims to define an integrated methodology for modelling judgments, starting from legal texts and capturing not only structural parts but also arguments used by judges to reach conclusions. The goal is to build a complete ontology framework capable of detecting and modelling knowledge from the judgement’s text. The formalized judgements provide the necessary metadata for the rule layer to enable argumentation towards the acceptance or rejection of a given interpretation. For pursuing this goal it is important to integrate the legal ontology construction with a rule formalization following legal reasoning-oriented theory and defeasible logics, just like the Carneades application (presented here) follows Walton's argumentation theory. The XML interchange uses OWL, RuleML, and the emerging LegalRuleML.

The paper shows how to model judgments starting from the decision's text and creating an onto... more The paper shows how to model judgments starting from the decision's text and creating an ontology which represents the interpretations performed by the judge while conducting its discourse towards the adjudication. The modelling is carried out using the OWL standard in order to be compliant with the ontology layer of the Semantic Web Cake. The goal of this approach is to build a complete ontology framework capable of detecting and modelling jurisprudence directly from the text, performing some basic reasoning on the knowledge base and providing semantically rich information for the logic and proof layers.

Empirical Software Engineering, 2021

Semantic legal metadata provides information that helps with understanding and interpreting legal... more Semantic legal metadata provides information that helps with understanding and interpreting legal provisions. Such metadata is therefore important for the systematic analysis of legal requirements. However, manually enhancing a large legal corpus with semantic metadata is prohibitively expensive. Our work is motivated by two observations: (1) the existing requirements engineering (RE) literature does not provide a harmonized view on the semantic metadata types that are useful for legal requirements analysis; (2) automated support for the extraction of semantic legal metadata is scarce, and it does not exploit the full potential of artificial intelligence technologies, notably natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Our objective is to take steps toward overcoming these limitations. To do so, we review and reconcile the semantic legal metadata types proposed in the RE literature. Subsequently, we devise an automated extraction approach for the identified metadata types using NLP and ML. We evaluate our approach through two case studies over the Luxembourgish legislation. Our results indicate a high accuracy in the generation of metadata annotations. In particular, in the two case studies, we were able to obtain precision scores of 97.2% and 82.4%, and recall scores of 94.9% and 92.4%.

This research aims to define an integrated methodology for modelling judgments, starting from leg... more This research aims to define an integrated methodology for modelling judgments, starting from legal texts and capturing not only structural parts but also arguments used by judges to reach conclusions. The goal is to build a complete ontology framework capable of detecting and modelling knowledge from the judgement's text. The formalized judgements provide the necessary metadata for the rule layer to enable argumentation towards the acceptance or rejection of a given interpretation. For pursuing this goal it is important to integrate the legal ontology construction with a rule formalization following legal reasoning-oriented theory and defeasible logics, just like the Carneades application (presented here) follows Walton's argumentation theory. The XML interchange uses OWL, RuleML, and the emerging LegalRuleML.

The present paper presents an ontology set built in OWL2 language, whose aim is to classify the m... more The present paper presents an ontology set built in OWL2 language, whose aim is to classify the metadata coming from judicial documents (judicial decisions and other acts of a judicial process) with a particular focus on judicial interpretation. The set is constituted by a core ontology, containing a standard model for the classification of knowledge related to judicial interpretation, and a domain ontology, where this model is applied to a set of real-life judicial deci-sionson in consumer law, automatically extracted from a case-law repository. The most important design choice is the creation of a complex class called "Qual-ifying Legal Expression", and the utilization of the new feature of OWL2 called ObjectPropertyChain to bind together the semantics judicial interpretation in-stances. Well aware that representing legal reasoning requires defeasible reason-ing, which OWL-DL cannot achieve due to its Open World Assumption, the aim of this experimental ontology is to tes...

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law - ICAIL '11, 2011

One open problem in the AI & Law community is how to provide computers with a basic understanding... more One open problem in the AI & Law community is how to provide computers with a basic understanding of legal concepts, and their relationship with legal texts and with the legal lexicon. We propose to add a layer to connect the linguistic description of the provisions to syntactic patterns using FramNet that can be exploited thought NLP tools. A deep-parsing and shallowsemantics approach has been devised to interpret and retrieve the characterizing components of legal modificatory provisions. In this paper we single out the case of efficacy suspension and show how FrameNet approach can provide profit especially to isolate temporal parameters and their interpretation.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

In this work we illustrate a novel approach for solving an information extraction problem on lega... more In this work we illustrate a novel approach for solving an information extraction problem on legal texts. It is based on Natural Language Processing techniques and on the adoption of a formalization that allows coupling domain knowledge and syntactic information. The proposed approach is applied to extend an existing system to assist human annotators in handling normative modificatory provisions-that are the changes to other normative texts-. Such laws 'versioning' problem is a hard and relevant one. We provide a linguistic and legal analysis of a particular case of modificatory provision (the efficacy suspension), show how such knowledge can be formalized in a linguistic resource such as FrameNet, and used by the semantic interpreter.

This paper presents a visualization technique to assist legal experts in formalising their interp... more This paper presents a visualization technique to assist legal experts in formalising their interpretation of legal texts in terms of regulatory requirements. (Semi-)automation of compliance processes requires a machine-readable version of legal requirements in a format that enables effective compliance assessment. The use of a semi-structured controlled natural language as an intermediate step of the translation from a human-readable text to a machine-readable and understandable format ensures that the process of interpretation of those requirements is as simple as possible. However, it does not ensure that the formal representation resulting from the interpretation faithfully represents the intended semantics provided by the legal expert. Visualization techniques such as property graphs in Neo4j could fill this gap, allowing legal experts to understand and control the formal representation of the result of their act of interpretation.

This paper presents a visualization technique to assist legal experts in formalising their interp... more This paper presents a visualization technique to assist legal experts in formalising their interpretation of legal texts in terms of regulatory requirements. (Semi-)automation of compliance processes requires a machine-readable version of legal requirements in a format that enables effective compliance assessment. The use of a semi-structured controlled natural language as an intermediate step of the translation from a human-readable text to a machine-readable and understandable format ensures that the process of interpretation of those requirements is as simple as possible. However, it does not ensure that the formal representation resulting from the interpretation faithfully represents the intended semantics provided by the legal expert. Visualization techniques such as property graphs in Neo4j could fill this gap, allowing legal experts to understand and control the formal representation of the result of their act of interpretation.

Abstract. This paper presents an application of the Carneades Argumentation System to case-law. T... more Abstract. This paper presents an application of the Carneades Argumentation System to case-law. The application relies on a set of ontologies – representing the core and domain concepts of a restricted legal field, the law of contracts – and a collection of precedents taken from Italian courts of different grades. The knowledge base represents the starting point for the construction of rules representing laws and precedents which, in turn, are responsible for the argumentative reasoning. The system reconstructs the legal interpretations performed by the judge, presenting its reasoning path and suggesting possible different or divergent interpretation in the light of relevant code- and case-law.

The continuous increase in quantity and depth of regulation following the financial crisis has le... more The continuous increase in quantity and depth of regulation following the financial crisis has left the financial industry in dire need of making its compliance assessment activities more effective. The field of AI & Law provides models that, despite being fit for the representation of semantics of requirements, do not share the approach favoured by the industry which relies on business vocabularies such as SBVR. This paper presents Mercury, a solution for representing the requirements and vocabulary contained in a regulatory text (or business policy) in a SME-friendly way, for the purpose of determining compliance. Mercury includes a structured language based on SBVR, with a rulebook, containing the regulative and constitutive rules, and a vocabulary, containing the actions and factors that determine a rule’s applicability and its legal effect. Mercury includes an XML persistence model and is mapped to an OWL ontology called FIRO, enabling semantic applications.

2019 IEEE 27th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2019

Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search so... more Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search solutions offered by present-day legal portals are targeted primarily at legal professionals. These solutions are not adequate for requirements analysts whose objective is to extract domain knowledge including stakeholders, rights and duties, and business processes that are relevant to legal requirements. Semantic Web technologies now enable smart search capabilities and can be exploited to help requirements analysts in elaborating legal requirements. In our previous work, we developed an automated framework for extracting semantic metadata from legal texts. In this paper, we investigate the use of our metadata extraction framework as an enabler for smart legal search with a focus on requirements engineering activities. We report on our industrial experience helping the Government of Luxembourg provide an advanced search facility over Luxembourg's Income Tax Law. The experience shows that semantic legal metadata can be successfully exploited for answering requirements engineering-related legal queries. Our results also suggest that our conceptualization of semantic legal metadata can be further improved with new information elements and relations.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016

The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is a specification created by the ... more The Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is a specification created by the Object Management Group (OMG) to provide a way to semantically describe business concepts and specify business rules. However, reasoning with SBVR is still an open subject, and current efforts to provide reasoning are done through the Web Ontology Language (OWL), by providing a mapping between SBVR and OWL. In this paper we focus on the problem of mapping SBVR vocabulary and rulebook to OWL 2, but unlike previous mappings described in the literature, we provide a novel and unorthodox mapping that allows to describe legal rules which have their own intricate anatomy.

Law and Philosophy Library, 2014

ABSTRACT The present paper represents an effort towards the acquisition of an acknowledged standa... more ABSTRACT The present paper represents an effort towards the acquisition of an acknowledged standard for the rule and logics layer of the semantic web stack of technologies. It is part of a broader research trying to improve the state-of-the-art of legal knowledge representation by facing its main issues: the gap between document representation and rule modeling, and the need for a shared standard in the logic layer to represent legal reasoning. The paper focuses on the upper part of the semantic web stack, namely the rules and logics layers: here, the Carneades Argumentation System supports the reproduction of judicial argumentation through a ruleset and a knowledge base imported from an OWL/RDF ontology. Being based upon the theories of argumentation developed by T. Gordon and D. Walton, Carneades supports argumentation schemes and uses them as templates while instantiating rules, ontology and cases into argument graphs. We argue that using argument schemes is the only viable choice to represent legal reasoning properly, and for this purpose, the concept of argument scheme should include templates that represent procedural aspects of legal processes, such as the acts available to the parties during a court trial. Even if emerging standards in rule representation (such as LegalRuleML) overcome many of the limitations of precedent languages, they lack a complete model of the argumentation process. This, as the paper tries to demonstrate, prevents the representation of legal arguments in their procedural aspects and in those aspects related to patterns and tasks of argumentation, hindering its capability to perform a correct evaluation of the acceptability of legal arguments. In order to support that claim, two examples are provided. The concluding remarks broaden the perspective to include the general need for a standard in legal reasoning engines.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

ABSTRACT This paper presents part of a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, aimed at a... more ABSTRACT This paper presents part of a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, aimed at achieving a strong text-to-knowledge morphism between legal text and legal concepts by filling the gap between the semantics of judicial documents and the syntax of legal norms. The research relies on the previous efforts of the community in the field of legal knowledge representation and rule interchange for applications in the legal domain, and tries to apply those theoretical models to a set of real legal documents. The aim is to formalize the legal concepts and the argumentation patterns contained in a judgement, as expressed by the judicial text. The bases of the framework are a set of metadata associated with judicial concepts and an ontology library, combining the features of OWL2 and description logics to provide a semantically powerful representation of case-law and a solid ground for an argumentation system based on defeasible rules. The present paper shortly presents the metadata and ontology layers, focusing on the rules and argumentation layers. In the example provided, an application of the Carneades Argumentation System, the framework reconstructs the legal interpretations performed by the judge in a specific judicial decision, presenting its reasoning path, and suggesting possible different interpretations in the light of relevant code-and case-law.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

ABSTRACT The paper shows how to model judgments starting from the text and capturing not only the... more ABSTRACT The paper shows how to model judgments starting from the text and capturing not only the structural parts, but also the basic arguments used by the judge to reach its conclusions. We have also included a qualification of citations following the Shepard's method. The goal of this approach is to build a complete ontology framework capable of detecting and modelling knowledge directly from the judgment's text, providing the basic metadata to the logic and reasoning layers.

Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2017

The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, b... more The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, by using knowledge extracted from text, metadata, and rules, while maintaining a strong text-to-knowledge morphism between legal text and legal concepts, in order to fill the gap between legal document and its semantics. The framework is composed of four different models that make use of standard languages from the Semantic Web stack of technologies: a document metadata structure, modelling the main parts of a judgement, and creating a bridge between a text and its semantic annotations of legal concepts; a legal core ontology, modelling abstract legal concepts and institutions contained in a rule of law; a legal domain ontology, modelling the main legal concepts in a specific domain concerned by case-law; an argumentation system, modelling the structure of argumentation. The input to the framework includes metadata associated with judicial concepts, and an ontology library representing th...

Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search so... more Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search solutions offered by present-day legal portals are targeted primarily at legal professionals. These solutions are not adequate for requirements analysts whose objective is to extract domain knowledge including stakeholders, rights and duties, and business processes that are relevant to legal requirements. Semantic Web technologies now enable smart search capabilities and can be exploited to help requirements analysts in elaborating legal requirements. In our previous work, we developed an automated framework for extracting semantic metadata from legal texts. In this paper, we investigate the use of our metadata extraction framework as an enabler for smart legal search with a focus on requirements engineering activities. We report on our industrial experience helping the Government of Luxembourg provide an advanced search facility over Luxembourg’s Income Tax Law. The experience shows that ...

The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, b... more The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, by using knowledge extracted from text, metadata, and rules, while maintaining a strong text-to-knowledge morphism between legal text and legal concepts, in order to fill the gap between legal document and its semantics. The framework is composed of four different models that make use of standard languages from the Semantic Web stack of technologies: a document metadata structure, modelling the main parts of a judgement, and creating a bridge between a text and its semantic annotations of legal concepts; a legal core ontology, modelling abstract legal concepts and institutions contained in a rule of law; a legal domain ontology, modelling the main legal concepts in a specific domain concerned by case-law; an argumentation system, modelling the structure of argumentation. The input to the framework includes metadata associated with judicial concepts, and an ontology library representing th...

This research aims to define an integrated methodology for modelling judgments, starting from leg... more This research aims to define an integrated methodology for modelling judgments, starting from legal texts and capturing not only structural parts but also arguments used by judges to reach conclusions. The goal is to build a complete ontology framework capable of detecting and modelling knowledge from the judgement’s text. The formalized judgements provide the necessary metadata for the rule layer to enable argumentation towards the acceptance or rejection of a given interpretation. For pursuing this goal it is important to integrate the legal ontology construction with a rule formalization following legal reasoning-oriented theory and defeasible logics, just like the Carneades application (presented here) follows Walton's argumentation theory. The XML interchange uses OWL, RuleML, and the emerging LegalRuleML.

The paper shows how to model judgments starting from the decision's text and creating an onto... more The paper shows how to model judgments starting from the decision's text and creating an ontology which represents the interpretations performed by the judge while conducting its discourse towards the adjudication. The modelling is carried out using the OWL standard in order to be compliant with the ontology layer of the Semantic Web Cake. The goal of this approach is to build a complete ontology framework capable of detecting and modelling jurisprudence directly from the text, performing some basic reasoning on the knowledge base and providing semantically rich information for the logic and proof layers.

Empirical Software Engineering, 2021

Semantic legal metadata provides information that helps with understanding and interpreting legal... more Semantic legal metadata provides information that helps with understanding and interpreting legal provisions. Such metadata is therefore important for the systematic analysis of legal requirements. However, manually enhancing a large legal corpus with semantic metadata is prohibitively expensive. Our work is motivated by two observations: (1) the existing requirements engineering (RE) literature does not provide a harmonized view on the semantic metadata types that are useful for legal requirements analysis; (2) automated support for the extraction of semantic legal metadata is scarce, and it does not exploit the full potential of artificial intelligence technologies, notably natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Our objective is to take steps toward overcoming these limitations. To do so, we review and reconcile the semantic legal metadata types proposed in the RE literature. Subsequently, we devise an automated extraction approach for the identified metadata types using NLP and ML. We evaluate our approach through two case studies over the Luxembourgish legislation. Our results indicate a high accuracy in the generation of metadata annotations. In particular, in the two case studies, we were able to obtain precision scores of 97.2% and 82.4%, and recall scores of 94.9% and 92.4%.

This research aims to define an integrated methodology for modelling judgments, starting from leg... more This research aims to define an integrated methodology for modelling judgments, starting from legal texts and capturing not only structural parts but also arguments used by judges to reach conclusions. The goal is to build a complete ontology framework capable of detecting and modelling knowledge from the judgement's text. The formalized judgements provide the necessary metadata for the rule layer to enable argumentation towards the acceptance or rejection of a given interpretation. For pursuing this goal it is important to integrate the legal ontology construction with a rule formalization following legal reasoning-oriented theory and defeasible logics, just like the Carneades application (presented here) follows Walton's argumentation theory. The XML interchange uses OWL, RuleML, and the emerging LegalRuleML.

The present paper presents an ontology set built in OWL2 language, whose aim is to classify the m... more The present paper presents an ontology set built in OWL2 language, whose aim is to classify the metadata coming from judicial documents (judicial decisions and other acts of a judicial process) with a particular focus on judicial interpretation. The set is constituted by a core ontology, containing a standard model for the classification of knowledge related to judicial interpretation, and a domain ontology, where this model is applied to a set of real-life judicial deci-sionson in consumer law, automatically extracted from a case-law repository. The most important design choice is the creation of a complex class called "Qual-ifying Legal Expression", and the utilization of the new feature of OWL2 called ObjectPropertyChain to bind together the semantics judicial interpretation in-stances. Well aware that representing legal reasoning requires defeasible reason-ing, which OWL-DL cannot achieve due to its Open World Assumption, the aim of this experimental ontology is to tes...

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law - ICAIL '11, 2011

One open problem in the AI & Law community is how to provide computers with a basic understanding... more One open problem in the AI & Law community is how to provide computers with a basic understanding of legal concepts, and their relationship with legal texts and with the legal lexicon. We propose to add a layer to connect the linguistic description of the provisions to syntactic patterns using FramNet that can be exploited thought NLP tools. A deep-parsing and shallowsemantics approach has been devised to interpret and retrieve the characterizing components of legal modificatory provisions. In this paper we single out the case of efficacy suspension and show how FrameNet approach can provide profit especially to isolate temporal parameters and their interpretation.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

In this work we illustrate a novel approach for solving an information extraction problem on lega... more In this work we illustrate a novel approach for solving an information extraction problem on legal texts. It is based on Natural Language Processing techniques and on the adoption of a formalization that allows coupling domain knowledge and syntactic information. The proposed approach is applied to extend an existing system to assist human annotators in handling normative modificatory provisions-that are the changes to other normative texts-. Such laws 'versioning' problem is a hard and relevant one. We provide a linguistic and legal analysis of a particular case of modificatory provision (the efficacy suspension), show how such knowledge can be formalized in a linguistic resource such as FrameNet, and used by the semantic interpreter.

This paper presents a visualization technique to assist legal experts in formalising their interp... more This paper presents a visualization technique to assist legal experts in formalising their interpretation of legal texts in terms of regulatory requirements. (Semi-)automation of compliance processes requires a machine-readable version of legal requirements in a format that enables effective compliance assessment. The use of a semi-structured controlled natural language as an intermediate step of the translation from a human-readable text to a machine-readable and understandable format ensures that the process of interpretation of those requirements is as simple as possible. However, it does not ensure that the formal representation resulting from the interpretation faithfully represents the intended semantics provided by the legal expert. Visualization techniques such as property graphs in Neo4j could fill this gap, allowing legal experts to understand and control the formal representation of the result of their act of interpretation.