Analysis of legal thesauri based on self-organising feature maps
Dieter Merkl · 1995
. This paper is concerned with the application of Kohonen's self-organising feature map to legal knowledge acquisition. More precisely, the map is used for analysis of legal thesauri which are obtained by means of connotation analysis of the individual document descriptors. The outcome of the learning process of the artificial neural network is further used to distinguish between precise legal terms and terms with rather fuzzy meaning. INTRODUCTION The formalisation of legal data, e.g. statutes, court decisions or treaties, constitutes a necessary prerequisite for advanced legal information processing. Common approaches to cope with this problem are first, rewriting the law as a logic program and second, performing linguistic analysis of the legal language. The former approach represents a harsh simplification of the complexity of legal systems and thus leads to severe limitations as for example the open texture problem. Inherent to the latter approach is the obvious fact that so far...