Leiden University Scholarly Publications

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Bakker, R.M.; Boer, M.H.T. de; Drie, R.A.N. van; Vos, D. (2022)

Extracting structured knowledge from Dutch legal texts: a rule-based approach

Article in monograph or in proceedings
Legal texts are difficult to interpret, and its interpretation depends on the knowledge and experience of
the legal expert. Formalising interpretations can improve transparency. However, creating formalisations
of legal texts is labour-intensive, and automatically creating them is still a challenge. Previous work
showed that rule-based systems have mixed success on Dutch legal texts. They use complex rule systems
for specific cases, making them hard to compare. Because of the lack of analysis, the success of these
methods is also unclear. In this paper, we propose a new rule-based architecture for detecting the
different roles of Flint frames, a knowledge representation language which aims to be a generic and less
task-dependent language. The rules in this architecture are based on Part-of-Speech tags and universal
dependency tags. Our analysis shows that this combination yields more precise extraction of the roles of
Flint frames than previous methods,...Show moreLegal texts are difficult to interpret, and its interpretation depends on the knowledge and experience of
the legal expert. Formalising interpretations can improve transparency. However, creating formalisations
of legal texts is labour-intensive, and automatically creating them is still a challenge. Previous work
showed that rule-based systems have mixed success on Dutch legal texts. They use complex rule systems
for specific cases, making them hard to compare. Because of the lack of analysis, the success of these
methods is also unclear. In this paper, we propose a new rule-based architecture for detecting the
different roles of Flint frames, a knowledge representation language which aims to be a generic and less
task-dependent language. The rules in this architecture are based on Part-of-Speech tags and universal
dependency tags. Our analysis shows that this combination yields more precise extraction of the roles of
Flint frames than previous methods, and the use of universal dependency tags allows this method to also
be applied to other languages. For further improvement we suggest extending the rules for extracting
the recipient role, add rules for recognising complex relative clauses, and testing this framework on
English legal texts.
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All authors
Bakker, R.M.; Boer, M.H.T. de; Drie, R.A.N. van; Vos, D.
Date
2022-09-29

Conference

Conference
EKAW (Companion)
Date
2022-09-26 - 2022-09-29
Location
Bolzano