Semantic Processing of Legal Texts : Where the Language of Law Meets the Law of Language

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.