Progetto di ricerca: LOIS (Lexical Ontologies for Legal Information Society)
Materiali

The goal of LOIS

The goal of LOIS, however, is not only to localize resources for the sake of exploitation by third parties. LOIS, actually aims at creating a paradigm for accessing legal resources both from a monolingual and cross lingual point of view. More in details:

- One of the typical obstacle the citizen is faced with when accessing legal resources is represented by the so called “Legal Jargon”. Indeed several legal concepts may have different denominations in the common language and the legal language. For instance in Italian, the common term ‘affitto’ (rental), which any entrepreneur will use to retrieve the relevant legal documentation, is mapped into the legal Jargon as ‘locazione di immobili‘ (rental agreement).

By maintaining links between several Legal European Wordnets with the corresponding “standard language” Wordnets (whenever available), the localized resources will provide a formal way to map standard language onto legal jargon an vice versa.

The Information Retrieval engine which will be at the base of LOIS, will be able to exploit such links, in a way that the query of a user unable to use technical terms will retrieve also documents which contains technical “translations” of the commonly used term.1

- Even professional people in the legal field might have problems in retrieving certain kind of legal documents by using appropriate keywords. This emerges with a particular strength when they have to look for case laws (judicial decisions), where the discursive style of the argumentation is affected by the semantic ambiguity of natural language . The same legal concepts can indeed be designed with different terms which are just synonyms from a legal point of view. Automatic query expansion on the base of synsets will lead to a better user satisfaction in the case of unresponsive queries (i.e. queries by which less documents than expected are retrieved).

- Even more crucially, both corporate users, citizens, and especially professional organizations will benefit from the cross language linkage in order to retrieve relevant legal documents from different European countries. Such a need is very strong, as social and economic activities which require legal backgrounds, are acquiring a wider and wider European dimension. In the future we envisage that even poorly specialized legal studios will be in need of consulting legal documentation from different countries. Thanks to the LOIS results (of which the LOIS Information Retrieval system is just an incarnation) they will be able to do it even without accurate knowledge of the relevant languages: once the relevant documents will be retrieved, users couldlook for translated version of the documentation, if available, or ask for professional translation services.