Legal language

Law uses language both in its theoretical aspect, as knowledge to be communicated, and in its practical application, as content to be understood and interpreted. In legal texts, the linguistic and conceptual layers are strictly intertwined, so that formal quality and terminological clearness in juridical discourse largely depend on the coherent organization between lexical and conceptual elements. In building computational applications for legal domain, the key point, lays in facing the linguistic layer to organize, manage, distribute and share legal information, in the same way as legal practitioners ground the application of law on accurate interpretation of legal language. ICT tools, namely Natural Language Processing techniques, have proved to be effective in this domain, by providing both an instrument for linguistic analysis and a mean for building lexical resources: NLP supports the semantic modeling of legal knowledge, the structuring of multilingual terminological repositories and the design of domain ontologies, all of them necessary components of the legal semantic web. The goal towards a “good law” is twofold: the coherent integration of multilevel and multilingual legal sources in a global net and the improvement of quality in normative drafting.