Using NLP techniques to create legal ontologies in a logic programming based web information retrieval system
Paulo Quaresma · 2003
Web legal information retrieval systems need the capability to reason with the knowledge modelled by legal ontologies. Using this knowledge it is possible to represent and to make inferences about the semantic content of legal documents. In this paper a methodology for applying NLP techniques to automatically create a legal ontology is proposed. The ontology is dened in the OWL semantic web language and it is used in a logic programming framework, EVOLP+ISCO, to allow users to query the semantic content of the documents. ISCO allows an easy and ecien t integration of declarative, object-oriented and constraint-based programming techniques with the capability to create connections with external databases. EVOLP is a dynamic logic programming framework allowing the denition of rules for actions and events. An application of the proposed methodology to the legal web information retrieval system of the Portuguese Attorney General’s Oce is described.