DALOS - Drafting Legislation with Ontology-Based Support

The lack of knowledge and control over legal lexicon is a important cause of dysfunctions in the legislative process, leading to the production of legal texts which are terminologically imprecise or incoherent. This undermines the understandability of law texts generating uncertainties in the interpretation and application. Moreover, by compromising the understandability of legal documents, terminological defects impair democratic debate by making it more difficult to grasp substantive issues and by generating misunderstanding. In particular it is difficult to maintain lexical coherence in the synchronic dimension, when different legal domains, different legal systems, and different languages are to be considered (as it is the case for EU law) and in the diachronic dimensions, when the law changes frequently (as it happens in many heavily regulated domains).

The main purposes of the DALOS project is ensuring that legal drafters and decision-makers have control over the legal language at national and European level, by providing law-makers with linguistic and knowledge management tools to be used in the legislative processes, in particular within the phase of legislative drafting. This will contribute to the harmonisation and coherence of legislative texts. Moreover, once the text is delivered, ontological knowledge will facilitate retrieval for European citizens and also interpretation and implementation of legal documents.

These results, besides a well structured multilingual domain-specific ontology require a set of computer tools, clustered around such ontology. Such tools will allow to monitor the connection between the language and terminology used in the text and the harmonised concept repository, thus allowing the law makers to get immediate feedback on the quality and accessibility of the language used. On the other hand, tools for terminology extraction and ontology learning can help the expansion of existing ontologies and terminological repositories in a controlled and harmonized way. In DALOS project such tools are expected to manage multilingual issues: they will be addressed to harmonize legal concepts and related terminologies used in European legislation as well as in the legislation of different European countries. To obtain this result the project will exploit  linguisticontological resources developed within previous European project experiences. In particular to guarantee the feasibility of the project, the ontological-terminological resources developed within LOIS project (EDC 22161- see http://www.loisproject.org ) , will be made available for integration within the drafting tools, used by legislative offices, through a defined standard interface, thus without interfering in the chain of legislative production, but nevertheless guaranteeing the improvement of the law making activity and the final products of the legislative processes. Using such resources legislative drafters will be able to query linguistic and ontological resources,  searching for appropriate and standardized terms or locutions, corresponding to specific legal concepts. The above resources will be integrated with T2K (“Text-to-Knowledge”), an ontology learning tool jointly developed at CNR-ILC and Pisa University (Department of Linguistics) which combines linguistic and statistical techniques to carry out the ontology learning task. Starting from a document collection, T2K acquires domain terminology (both simple and multi-word terms) and organizes the set of acquired terms into a) taxonomical chains (reconstructed from their internal linguistic structure), and b) clusters of semantically related terms (inferred through distributionally based similarity measures). Moreover the GATE tool developed by the University of Sheffield Computer Science Department will be integrated as well. It supports advanced language analysis, data visualisation, and information sharing in many languages. GATE has facilities for viewing, editing, and annotating corpora in a wide number of languages (based on Unicode) and has been used successfully for the creation, semi-automatic annotation and analysis of many electronic resources. It contains many modules for the annotation of textual material, such as part of speech information, lemmatization, conceptual indexing and semantic annotation.

The expected results will be measured in terms of quality of the produced legal texts. To measure the impact of the DALOS prototype European directives on protection of consumers' economic and legal interests, on internal market and the “rejected” Constitutional treaty will be used as case study. In particular all these data will try to testify the importance for the people to understand laws and naturally pose the constitutional treaty as an ideal test bed to verify the capacities of the DALOS system.