VERBS & TOPIC MAPS: A PROPOSAL FOR LEGAL

DOCUMENTATION FROM THE DOCUMENT CONTENT

ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE

Miguel Ángel Marzal

Professor

Dpto. Biblioteconomía y Documentación. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Carmen Bolaños

Associate Professor

Departamento de Historia del Derecho y las Instituciones. UNED

Jorge Morato

Visiting Professor

Dpto. Informática. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Javier Calzada Prado

Research Grant

Dpto. Biblioteconomía y Documentación. Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Keywords: Legal Documentation, Document Analysis, Verb Thesauri, Topic Maps.

Abstract: A final evaluation of the project Development of a verb thesaurus for dynamic information environments.

Implementation of the ISO/IEC 12350:1999 standard is presented as a base for the use of its results on

future research projects. First, the interest of the Library and Information Science field towards verbal

structures is justified for its efficacy on the documental analysis of the movement for: a) a relevant

indentification, description and classification of hypermedia, b) its sufficient analytic documental adaptation

to the the dynamic transverse character of the hypertext contents and c) the required redefinition of the

hierarchical structure of thesauri. Then the methodological evolution of these dynamic concepts is tackled as

well as its implementation to the development of verb thesauri for the Spanish legal language. Main

contributions of this paper are new research lines oriented to a more specific field of theoric formulation and

instrumental implementation.

1 INTRODUCTION

Every investigative process implies, as a scientific

imperative, the need to evaluate not only the results,

but the process itself, with the aim of providing valid

conclusions for a specialized scientific community.

This is the objective which guides the present

contribution, to evaluate the project Development of

a thesaurus of verbs for dynamic informational

settings. Application of the ISO/IEC Standard:

12350:1999

, initiated in 2000 with financing from

the CICYT. Nevertheless, a second objective

emerged during the course of the study, which is that

the evaluation should serve as the basis for the

development of a new Scientific-Technical Report

which allows for the soliciting of a new research

project capable of applying the results from the

project which has just ended.

The research project initiated in 2000 followed in

the wake of prior analyses of our research group,

Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología. Plan

General del Conocimiento. TIC 2000-2003.

Ángel Marzal M., Ángel Marzal M., Bolaños C., Morato J. and Calzada Prado J. (2004).

VERBS & TOPIC MAPS: A PROPOSAL FOR LEGAL DOCUMENTATION FROM THE DOCUMENT CONTENT ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE.

In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 63-68

DOI: 10.5220/0002629400630068

 SciTePress

whose purpose was the automation of the

construction of thesauri through the concurrence of

certain nouns in a thesaurus with certain dynamic

concepts, such that, once the corpus of the document

was indexed by nouns, these could be interrelated

with verbal structures (Díaz, 2001). Precedents

existed in the scientific literature which support such

an effort, in which current technological

developments could enable its application to the

knowledge domain.

Three stimuli guided our interest, from

Doc

umentation toward verbal structures:

• Its efficiency

in document analysis in the

movement for an adequate identification,

description and classification of

hypermedia and, in particular, materials in

Virtual Reality. The term noun indexing

offers a static conceptual representation

which obligates complex searches by

juxtaposition or development of

increasingly specific noun phrases.

• Su

fficient document analysis adaptation of

the dynamic transverse character of the

hypertext contents, as well as the priority of

the users in the recovery of online

information, generating a true research

trend around the users’ thesauri. The

development of markup languages and

metadata offer interesting prospects.

• Th

e required redefinition of the hierarchical

structure of thesauri. A study by the

American Library Association (ALA) in

2000 specified up to nine new large

subtypes of first level associative relations

as necessary, which allowed D. Tudhope,

H. Alani y C. Jones (2001) to propose an

expansion of the relations in automated

thesauri through a noticeable increase in

associative relations.

2 METHODOLOGICAL

EVOLUTION OF DYNAMIC

CONCEPTS

We denote the verb as a dynamic concept in

technological settings for the information retrieval,

for its capacity to represent conceptual action.

Nevertheless, the verb expresses a great complexity

as a vector of recovery due to its great inflexive

semantic richness in a documentary context, as well

as its prototypic inflection (time, mode, number)

according to the literary genre and structure, as

shown by Karlgren (1994, 1998). At the same time,

its use as an element of information retrieval

demanded an organization and ordering for which

the verbal classification of B. Levin (1993) wasn’t

sufficient in practical application because of its

complexity.

The successive methodological phases of the

oject, defined in different publications and

conference presentations by the research team,

oriented us toward a two-fold conviction: foremost

is the need to normalize the verb terminologically, to

segment the sentences where it acted and determine

its semantic function within a context; secondarily,

but no less important, is the need to delimit textual

domains and styles to conform to a corpus adequate

for both our research objectives and the intention to

organize the verbs semantically for information

retrieval. Within this two-fold approach, there are

two fruitful areas of collaboration.

2.1 Online linguistic instruments

Verbs appeared to behave with a visible recovery

efficiency within certain settings where they were

provided with a well-determined function. This was

the case with concept maps, quickly steered toward

their use as didactic digital resources by J. D. Novak

(1995, 45-49) where the significant learning object

concepts are represented by nouns, but are ordered

on the map through relationships (arches) which are

defined by verbs. This illustrative model confirms

for us the recovery effectiveness of the verb, if its

normalized presence in an information system is

refined and its function is determined through the

definition of the semantic role and meaning in the

system. We have chosen two bases:

2.1.1 WordNet

This is classified within the group of manually

constructed electronic dictionaries and, without

adhering to any particular domain, covers the

majority of English nouns, adjectives, verbs and

adverbs, making it an ideal instrument for clarifying

meanings, semantic labeling and information

retrieval.

Its terms, whether simple or compound, are

ganized in groupings of synonyms known as

synsets, where each of the synsets corresponds to a

concept. Each term has a brief description and

sometimes a related phrase which demonstrates it

usage, through a glossary. What makes WordNet a

truly useful tool is its lexical online structure, with

nearly 30,000 types of relations, typified in

equivalent topics relations, hierarchically between

synsets (hyperonym/hyponym; meronym/holonym),

but it is also responsible for two grammatical

ICEIS 2004 - HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION

categories unknown in document language:

adjectives and verbs, for which three possibilities are

recognized: Entailment, that is, a verb has this

relationship with another if its existence depends on

the other verb; Troponym or verb forms; Causal

Verb.

Research which recognizes having used

WordNet demonstrates its effectiveness in

multilingual settings, in the extraction of textual and

iconic document information, as well as in the

identification of concepts in natural language

through its use for clarification, for semantic

distance and the expansion of the query. Even more

significant for us, was its capacity in the extraction

and categorization of documents through the

extraction of semantics features by way of

grammatical categorization of names, verbs and

adjectives in WordNet and the prediction of the

user’s interest based on a hybrid model which

considered the key words and the conceptual

knowledge representation of WordNet

. Relying on

this, S. M. Harabagiu (1998, 265-269) has presented

a computational model to recognize the cohesive and

coherent structures of texts, with the contribution of

the lexical-semantic information of WordNet, whose

objective is to construct association designs between

phrases and coherence relations, as well as to

discover lexical characteristics within coherence

categories. WordNet, then, appeared as an auxiliary

instrument for the design of semantic ontologies,

immediately oriented for quality informational

extraction on the web, which has led Keng Woei

Tan, Hyoil-Han and R. Elmasri to present the

prototype WebOntEx (Web Ontology Extraction)

aimed at creating ontologies to describe semantically

data from the web

Judith Klavans & Min-Yen Kan (1998) have

investigated the automatic determination of the

genre of a document depending on the category of

verb in WordNet used in the same.

2.1.2 Computerized linguistic resources

The analyses and tools used by researchers in

Computational Linguistics have been particularly

useful, especially since our objective was becoming

the realization of a semantic of the relationships, an

G. Scheler, 1996, p. 499, suggested the grammatical

categorization. INFOS was analyzed by K. J. Mock & V.

R. Vemuri, 1997, pp. 633-644.

Meersman, R. A., 1999, pp. 30-45, identified the

ontological effectiveness of WordNet, demonstrated in

WebOntEx, which

Keng Woei Tan, Hyoil-Han and R.

Elmasri

present in 2000, pp. 11-18.

aspect in which it benefited from the linguistic

applications for the administration of information

contents. The computer applications of

Computational Linguistics permit one to lemmatize,

a voice by identifying its canonical form, its

grammatical category and its inflexion, as well as

obtain diverse forms from a single canonical form or

inflexion. This capability allows one to recognize,

generate and manipulate the morpholexical relations

in a voice. Both products of two computational

linguistics research groups have been useful to us:

• CLIC, a research group lead by Prof. María

Antonia Martí

. Among the possibilities

offered, in our effort to elaborate a system

which generates thesauri automatically, a

large role was played by: the parser,

generator and morphological clarifier to

identify morphological interpretations of a

voice through the inflexion generator

(which canonizes a voice as a lema (the

canonical form) and refers to it all its

associated forms), the lemmatizer (which

gives morphological information to the

lema) and the tagger (which labels the

components of an oration); the parser to

identify syntagmas in a sentence; and

EuroWordNet, particularly for its capacity

to define meanings according to the

synsets, the synonyms and the relations

between different meanings of words.

• GEDLC, of the Department of Computer

Science and Systems in the University of

Las Palmas in Gran Canaria

, joins the

functionality of the lemmatizer, inflexion

generator, clarifier, morphological

generator and morpholexical relations with

a system for Text Analysis, a

Computational System of Morphological

Administration of Spanish, but specifically

a Conjugator and Verbal Lemmatizer.

An adequate application of the principles of both

instruments has allowed us to begin resolving the

problems of the treatment of a base vocabulary of

the corpus, the terminological normalization and

clarification and a segmentation of units of

information. We realized that it was both possible

and necessary to widen the verbal morphology to

periphrasis and verbal locutions, much richer in the

Available from: <http://clic.fil.ub.es> [Cited

10/28/03].

Available from: <http://gedlc.ulpgc.es> [Cited

10/28/03].

VERBS & TOPIC MAPS: A PROPOSAL FOR LEGAL DOCUMENTATION FROM THE DOCUMENT CONTENT

ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE

associative potential of the relation, such that we can

begin to consider the verbal phraseological units.

2.2 Specialized languages

A field in which we converge with Terminology, the

scien

ce which demonstrates the intrinsic and

extrinsic characters of an object in a term, which

remains fixed to an idea which is related exclusively

to a single name. We had confirmed that for the

semantic of the relationships one option should be

cleared up: either we accept the dependence of an

author, or the dependence of a knowledge domain.

We prefer the second option, particularly due to the

emergence of specialized languages, understood as a

variant of the general language and defined as a

group of linguistic instruments (lexical,

morphological, syntactic) characteristic of a subject

matter and used by specialists for an optimal

understanding due to its exactitude, clarity and

conciseness. Its positive impact has stimulated an

avenue of investigation in some languages,

particularly in the economic and legal realms

(Alcaraz Varó, 2002), which is the case of EPA

(Español Profesional y Académico), from which

legal language has become a specialized language

(

Martín del Burgo y Marchán, 2000). In its

classification, Legal Spanish, in effect, received a

superstructure, that of normative-legal, which

establishes the guidelines for legal action, a function

which is particularly useful in accepting a verbal

semantic applicability. From this superstructure

Legal Spanish is further classified as legislative,

jurisprudential, administrative and notary. In our

research design, it became evident that the best

application of thesauri based on verbs was produced

in legislative and jurisprudential Legal Spanish.

3 THESAURI BASED ON VERBS

AND LEGAL

DOCUMENTATION

We believe, then, that we had discovered a field of

scientific action sufficiently restricted and distant

from an excessive arbitrariness to try to refine our

own tool Indexer for generating thesauri, following

the methodological procedure practiced by the

research team in other domains:

3.1 Creation of the corpus

The corpus was generated from digital legal

documentation, extracted as complete text from the

databases of the BOE (Boletín Oficial del Estado),

selecting the organic Laws in section I (General

Regulations), together with sentences from the

Supreme Court during the last five years.

We then proceed to the marking of the verbal

structures,

assigning a number according to whether

it is a personal form (1), an impersonal form (2) or a

periphrastic form (3), with particular attention being

paid to this last form, susceptible to behaving as a

phraseological unit with a strong capacity in the

association of concepts for information retrieval.

3.2 Processing of the corpus

We decided to use the following modus operandi to

systematize the processing:

• Ver

bal morphological normalization in

formal rules, through lemmatizers, taggers

and inflexion generators to comprise a list

of index terms to which the different verbal

inflexions are referred.

• C

onstruction of links from the verbal terms

toward the document corpus, to recover the

context. In this way, the verbal structures

were ordered according to a semantic

criteria of role relevance, but with attention

to each document type.

• Organization of the personal, impersonal

and periphrastic forms within each type of

document.

3.3 Classification

The extraordinary inflexive semantic richness of the

verb due to its action within a context, has prevented

us from undertaking a verbal hierarchical

classification, even in such specific and regulated

domains, which is more easily accomplished among

nouns. For this reason, we have resorted to two

initial criteria of categorization, in a simple outline,

according to the recovery system desired for

representation of the user:

3.3.1 Functional Categorization

A criteria which has allowed us, as a first approach,

to propose these first categories:

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• Promulgative

• Coercive

• Procedural: in origin, in development,

instrumental, acting, destined.

• Argumentative: discursive, common law-

jurisprudential, contextual, demonstrative,

dialogical.

• Documentary and Testimonial

• Sentencing law

• Case law.

3.3.2 Categorization of associative relations

for the verb

We follow the recommendations of A. Tudhope et

al., stipulating seventeen categories of relations, to

which we have assigned the verbal structures

according to the type of document:

• Fields of study and objects studied.

• Instrumentation: agent, operation, process.

• Action and its product.

• Action and its passive product.

• Action and its passive subject with

determination of the typical effect.

• Objects and concepts with properties and

effects.

• Concepts related with their origins.

• Concepts linked by chance.

• Object and contrary agent.

• Concepts and units of measure.

• Concomitance: symptom, signal, symbol.

• Constituent materials.

• Conceptual proximity: pertaining to the

same conceptual family.

• Similarity due to equivalent expression.

• Antonymy.

• Figured localization.

• Professionals and their field of study.

All these categories are suffering a process of

contrast according to their effectiveness during

information retrieval, but also in document

extraction: verbal inflexion is particularly useful

according to the type and constituent part of legal

documents.

4 FUTURE WORK

The previous approach, useful as a field in the

automatic generation of thesauri with a clear

application in professional legal practice, like

documentalists, nevertheless, has suggested to us an

exciting field of research: the retrieval of legal

information using the associative potential of online

information resources, once classified based on the

verbal phraseological units and the new tools of

information retrieval by associative semantics, a

process in which the development of markup

languages metadata take on a decisive importance.

Two elements have emerged as our referents:

• Ontologies, defined by Gruber as “a formal,

explicit specification of a shared

conceptualization”, whose basic concepts,

in our case, are: the class (concept) that

defines a category, which includes

instances (cases) and includes the

hierarchical class and the subclass; slots, to

describe properties and characteristics of

the concept; value, attribute applied to a

class or an instance and which determines

it.

• Topic maps, metaindexes which unite index

types with semantic interrelations,

attempting to provide master indexes which

can be administered independently and

easily updated in a technical document with

highly changing contents.

Topic maps currently comprise the starting point

of our research interests. The objective is that the

lawyer shouldn’t have to search for the sources of

information to issue a legal report, but rather, that

they select the concepts which they want to use and

interrelate independently of how the information

sources are organized or of their format (paper,

database, web pages, etc.) because each concept is

directly associated by hyperlinks to the information

sources on the particular concept. The topic is

always the representation of the subject in XML

language and is not defined solely by its

denomination (topic name), but also by its relations

(associations) and its subject (scope). In this way,

the ISO/IEC 13250 norm maximizes its importance

through the richness of the groupings which allow

for the establishment of associations among

concepts, in accordance with the possibilities which

logic and semantics offer the world. A particularly

pertinent possibility in our research is that the topic

associations can be classified according to an

association type, which is defined by the verbal form

which unites the topics, that is, the association type

is that which defines the verb that unites the topics

in each case.

Topic maps are most relevant in their possible

application to commercial and corporate information

resources, for which their online help facilitates

access to mass information, especially for the

information portals, since websites can be organized

through maps, at the same time that they offer

metainformation links with other websites, having

VERBS & TOPIC MAPS: A PROPOSAL FOR LEGAL DOCUMENTATION FROM THE DOCUMENT CONTENT

ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE

adequately combined the data modules, with which a

simplification of the access to relevant information

is achieved. Topic maps contribute, as well, one of

the main proposals to visualize the semantic web (Le

Grand and Soto, 2002, 203-225).The fact that a topic

map can present thousands of associations of

different typology (association types, roles,

occurrences, etc.) has lead to the development of

iconic representations, among which trees, browsers

and graphics stand out. The interface is analogous to

a normal web page, but in reality what we visualize

is always the relation of indexes used and the index

which we are using will be highlighted. The index is

never lost, in which the following could appear: a)

Laws b) Rules c) Statutes d) Legal Manuals e)

Databases f) Electronic Documents (web pages,

multimedia documents). What we are attempting to

accomplish is that searches are not performed based

on only a single term, without importance as to its

ordering or format.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The trajectory of the research project has suggested

new avenues oriented toward a more specific field of

theoretical formulation and instrumental application:

• The

need to efficiently categorize the verbal

phraseological structures in the realm of

Law, as well as improve the automatic

administration of relations in thesauri in the

field through Computational Linguistics.

• Achi

eve the representation of the user (the

lawyer) in the information system, through

a correct design of the associative

functionality of the new tools in the

processing of natural language.

• Desi

gn a manner to implement and apply

topic maps in the representation and

recovery of legal information, testing

applied models in legal practices or

jurisdictional instances of a different

nature.

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