Legal Knowledge Representation:Automatic Text Analysis in Public International and European Law

Book excerpt: This volume is a presentation of all methods of legal knowledge representation from the point of view of jurisprudence as well as computer science. A new method of automatic analysis of legal texts is presented in four case studies. Law is seen as an information system with legally formalised information processes. The achieved coverage of legal knowledge in information retrieval systems has to be followed by the next step: conceptual indexing and automatic analysis of texts. Existing approaches of automatic knowledge representations do not have a proper link to the legal language in information systems. The concept-based model for semi-automatic analysis of legal texts provides this necessary connection. The knowledge base of descriptors, context-sensitive rules and meta-rules formalises properly all important passages in the text corpora for automatic analysis. Statistics and self-organising maps give assistance in knowledge acquisition. The result of the analysis is organised with automatically generated hypertext links. Four case studies show the huge potential but also some drawbacks of this approach.