Semantic Processing of Legal Texts: Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language

The last few years have seen a growing body of research and practice addressing aspects such as automated legal reasoning and argumentation, semantic and cross-language legal information retrieval, document classification, legal drafting, legal knowledge discovery and extraction. This State-of-the-Art Survey contains invited contributions of leading researchers and groups eminently active in the field, which were complemented with selected papers from the Workshop on Semantic Processing of Legal Texts, held in Marrakech, Morocco, in 2008, within the framework of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008). These publications mirror the state-of-the-art in linguistic technologies, tools and resources focusing on the automatic extraction of relevant information from legal texts, and the structured organization of this extracted knowledge for legal knowledge representation and scholarly activity, with particular emphasis on the crucial role played by language resources and human language technologies. The contents are organized in three topical sections on information extraction; construction of knowledge resources; and semantic indexing, summarization and translation.