While formalizing legal sources is an important challenge, the generation of a formal representation from legal texts has been far less considered and requires considerable expertise. In order to improve the uniformity, richness, and efficiency of legal annotation, it is necessary to experiment with annotations and the annotation process. This paper reports on a first experiment, which was a campaign to annotate legal instruments provided by the Scottish Government's Parliamentary Counsel Office and bearing on Scottish smoking legislation and regulation. A small set of elements related to LegalRuleML was used. An initial guideline manual was produced to annotate the text using annotations related to these elements. The resulting annotated corpus is converted into a LegalRuleML XML compliant document, then made available via an online visualisation and query tool. In the course of annotating the documents, a range of important interpretive and practical issues arose, highlighting the value of a focused study on legal text annotation.
@InProceedings{NAZARENKO18.728, author = {Adeline Nazarenko and Francois Levy and Adam Wyner}, title = "{An Annotation Language for Semantic Search of Legal Sources}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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