Multilingual knowledge model for harmonizing legal information across Europe

The European Union integration process is progressively creating a complex regulatory environment in which the harmonization of national and EU laws plays a central role for guaranteeing social equities and effectiveness of rights. This process however faces obstacles due to different national legal traditions and systems in different Member States. This scenario is made even more complex by the multilingual dimension of the European settings, where it is often difficult to establish straightforward alignments between legal concepts in different languages and legal systems. A possible contribution to overcome such problems can be given by the availability of multilingual thesauri able to provide alignment and harmonization of legal concepts at EU level, as well as providing their different language variations. This tool aims to ensure 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 tool to be used in the legislative processes, in particular within the phase of legislative drafting. This tool can also be shared with the Member States in order to facilitate the harmonization process of transferring the European legislation into national laws. This approach such a thesaurus may represent a pivot knowledge resource which can be used also for harmonizing the indexing of national and European legislation, thus providing end users with advanced multilingual semantic search facilities. Retrieval of legal information over languages implies facilities similar to these used for retrieving any kind of information such as multiple language recognition, manipulation, display and cross language search and retrieval. In particular, there are three sides of the problem of legal cross-language retrieval, which are of a technical, linguistic and comparative nature. The approach here introduced is able to improve the quality of the retrieval of legislative documents, as well as to contribute to their comparative analysis. Eurovoc is an example of such multilingual thesauri. However Eurovoc has been conceived for classifying and indexing legislative documents for the European law. Therefore it does not include relevant concepts which can be sensitive to the national languages and the legal traditions. Proposals in this respect have been given in the DALOS project, as well as in the Syllabus multilingual thesaurus.