Semantic Processing of Legal Texts

ThelegaldomainrepresentsaprimarycandidateforWeb-basedinformationd- tribution,exchangeandmanagement,astesti?edbythenumerouse-government, e-justice and e-democracy initiatives worldwide. The last few years have seen a growing body of research and practice in the ?eld of arti?cial intelligence and law addressing aspects such as automated legal reasoning and argumentation, semantic and cross-languagelegalinformation retrieval, document classi?cation, legal drafting, legal knowledge discovery and extraction. Many e?orts have also been devoted to the construction of legal ontologies and their application to the law domain. A number of di?erent workshops and conferences have been organized on these topics in the framework of the arti?cial intelligence and law community: among them, the ICAIL (International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence and Law) and the Jurix (International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Inf- mation Systems) conferences; several workshops on legal ontologies have been held by the AI&Law Association (LOAIT) and by the Legal XML Community (LegalXMLWorkshopsandLegalXML Summer School).In allthese events,the topics of languageresourcesand human language technologiesreceiveincreasing attention.The situation is quite di?erent within the computational linguistics com- nity, where little attention has been paid to the legal domain besides a few isolated contributions and/or projects focussing on the processing of legal texts.