Identification and Visualization of Legal Definitions and Legal Term Relations

Abstract

Reading, analyzing, and implementing regulatory documents are cumbersome and still mostly manual tasks. The constantly increasing amount of regulatory documents causes an equally increasing need for supporting those tasks through information systems. One key aspect for accomplishing those tasks is to acquire knowledge of the different legal definitions, i.e., legal terms accompanied by their explanations, in order to build a legal vocabulary or an ontology. This paper proposes an approach taking European regulations as input and i) automatically extracting legal definitions, ii) determining semantic relations such as hyponyms, meronyms, and synonyms between legal terms, and iii) visualizing the results in form of a knowledge graph and statistics. The approach is evaluated on European regulations and made accessible particularly for non-technical users through an easy-to-use web service.