LawORDate is a web service that distinguishes legal references from temporal expressions in documents. It uses dedicated patterns to clean expressions that could mislead temporal taggers, normalizing them. An example shows legal references processed by LawORDate and cleaned for temporal tagging purposes. The service is intended to help detect references that could easily mislead temporal tagging of Spanish datasets and news.

1. LawORDate:
a Service for Distinguishing
Legal References from
Temporal Expressions
María Navas-Loro
mnavas@fi.upm.es
TeReCom (JURIX), 13th December 2017
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain)
LAW DATEOR

2. Outline
Outline
1. Background
2. State of the Art
3. Analysis
4. LawORDate
5. An example
6. Conclusion

3. BACKGROUND
Context
3

4. Background Project: the idea
Background project dealing with:
• Datasets
• News
Objective:
• Temporal characterization: obtain the temporal
coverage for resource linking.
What do we have to work with?
4

5. Background Project: datasets
• Creation date
• Modification date
5
• Datasets for Spanish Open data portal:
• Title
• Description
• Publisher, geo…

6. Background Project: news
• News:
• Release date
• Title
• Text
6

7. Background Project: tools
Temporal taggers:
1) Detect temporal references.
2) Normalize them.
We are using HeidelTime (Strötgen et al. 2013) for
Spanish, that annotates on following TimeML
guidelines (TIMEX3 tags).
7

8. Dataset description
8
Database that provides information on Technology Centers and
Innovation Support Centers registered in the registry created by the
Royal Decree 2093/2008, of December 19. It allows consultation by
Modality, Technological Area, Sector, Autonomous Community and/or
Province. In addition, it allows to download the full version in PDF.
Base de datos que proporciona información sobre los Centros
Tecnológicos y Centros de apoyo a la Innovación inscritos en el
registro creado mediante el Real Decreto 2093/2008, de 19 de
diciembre. Permite la consulta por Modalidad, Área Tecnológica,
Sector, Comunidad Autónoma y/o Provincia. Además, posibilita la
descarga de la versión completa en PDF
2008
2093
2008-12-19
2008-2093

9. News
9
These activities are regulated by Royal Decree 1341/2007, of 11th
October on the management of bathing water quality, incorporating
into Spanish law Directive 2006/7/ EC of the European Parliament
and of the Council of 15th February 2006 on to the management of
the quality of bathing waters.
Estas actividades están reguladas por Real Decreto 1341/2007, de
11 de octubre sobre la gestión de la calidad de las aguas de baño,
incorporando al derecho español la Directiva 2006/7/CE del
Parlamento Europeo y del Consejo de 15 de febrero de 2006
relativa a la gestión de la calidad de las aguas de baño.
1341, 2007
2016-10-11
2006,
2016-02-15
1341-2016

10. STATE OF THE ART
Unifing fields
10

11. 11
Daniel Isemann, Khurshid Ahmad, Tim Fernando, and Carl Vogel. Temporal
Dependence in Legal Documents, pages 497-504. Springer Berlin Heidelberg,
Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013.
Previous work

12. Temporal processing on legal documents
• Frank Schilder. Event Extraction and Temporal
Reasoning in Legal Documents.
Work on regulations, directives…
• Venkateswrlu Naik et al. Reasoning in legal text
documents with extracted event information.
Transactional documents.
• Kolikipogu Ramakrishna et al. A novel model for timed
event extraction and temporal reasoning in legal text
documents.
Transactional documents
12

13. References to legal documents
Aim  Normalization, mark up and linking.
• M. Adedjouma et al. Automated detection and resolution
of legal cross references: Approach and a study of
Luxembourg's legislation.
• E. de Maat, et al. Automated detection of reference
structures in law.
• M. Palmirani et al. Processing normative references on
the basis of natural language questions.
• O. Thi Tran et al. Automated reference resolution in
legal texts.
13

14. ANALYSIS
The Problem
14

15. Most common
Directiva 2012/27/UE
RD 1463/2007
Real Decreto 1341/2007
Ley Orgánica 10/1995
Ley 22/2011, de 28 de julio
BOE: 29/07/2011
BOE de 22 de julio
BOE núm. 306, de diciembre
15

16. Most common
Directiva del Parlamento Europeo y el Consejo
Europeo 2012/27/UE
Real Decreto 1341/2007
Ley Orgánica 10/1995
Ley 22/2011, de 28 de julio
BOE: 29/07/2011
BOE de 22 de julio
BOE núm. 306, de diciembre
16

17. Most common
Directiva del Parlamento Europeo y el Consejo
Europeo 2012/27/UE
Real Decreto Legislativo 1341/2007
Ley Orgánica 10/1995
Ley 22/2011, de 28 de julio
BOE: 29/07/2011
BOE de 22 de julio
BOE núm. 306, de diciembre
17

18. Most common
Directiva del Parlamento Europeo y el Consejo
Europeo 2012/27/UE
Real Decreto Legislativo 1341/2007
ley organica 10/1995
Ley 22/2011, de 28 de Julio
BOE: 29/07/2011
BOE de 22 de julio
BOE núm. 306, de diciembre
18

19. Most common
Directiva del Parlamento Europeo y el Consejo
Europeo 2012/27/UE
Real Decreto Legislativo 1341/2007
ley organica 10/1995
Ley 22/2011, de 28 de Julio
Publicaciones en Boletín Oficial del Estado
(BOE): 2013 – 2017
[Publications in the Official State Gazette
(BOE): 2013 – 2017]
19

20. 20
Publicaciones en Boletín Oficial del Estado
(BOE): 2013 – 2017
[Publications in the Official State Gazette
(BOE): 2013 – 2017]

21. LAWORDATE
The Solution
21

22. Main Idea
• Main idea:
Use dedicated patterns to clean
misleading expressions
• How:
Web service (cleans and restores the
expressions)
22

23. Pipeline
with Legal Refs
23
with Legal Refs
with Temporal Tags
Without
Legal
Refs
Map of
Legal
Refs
LAW DATEOR
LAW DATEOR

24. http://pgn2rdf.appspot.com/lawordate
24
POST METHOD (curl, POSTMAN…)
LAW DATEOR

25. AN EXAMPLE
Real Case
25
LAW DATEOR

26. 26

27. 27

28. CONCLUSION
Expected contributions
28

29. Conclusions
• Detect legal references easily misleading
temporal taggers, and “cleans” them for
temporal tagging purposes.
• Very specific: thought for Spanish
datasets/news, for very specific needs
(restricted patterns)
• Ongoing work (much room for improvement).
• Useful also for training temporal taggers on this
domain!
29

30. Future Work
• More patterns, more general.
• More languages.
• Include gazetteers of organizations.
• Include the annotation in the same process
(calls to temporal taggers).
• Easier to use (intuitive interface for single-use).
• (Output as json)
30

31. Thank you for your attention
31

32. Bibliography
• Jannik Strötgen and Michael Gertz. Multilingual and cross-
domain temporal tagging. Language Resources and Evaluation,
47(2):269-298, 2013.
• Frank Schilder. Event Extraction and Temporal Reasoning in
Legal Documents. In Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning
about Time and Events, International Seminar, Dagstuhl Castle,
Germany, April 10-15, 2005. Revised Papers, pages 59-71,
2005.
• Venkateswrlu Naik, Guda Vanitha, and Srujana Inturi. Reasoning
in legal text documents with extracted event information.
International Journal of Computer Applications, 28:8-13, 08
2011.
• Kolikipogu Ramakrishna, Vanitha Guda, B.Padmaja Rani, and
Vinaya Ch. A novel model for timed event extraction and
temporal reasoning in legal text documents. International Journal
of Computer Science and Engineering Survey, 2:39-48, 02 2011.
32

33. Bibliography
• M. Adedjouma, M. Sabetzadeh, and L. C. Briand. Automated
detection and resolution of legal cross references: Approach
and a study of luxembourg's legislation. In 2014 IEEE 22nd
International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 63-
72, Aug 2014.
• Emile de Maat, Radboud Winkels, and Tom van Engers.
Automated detection of reference structures in law. Frontiers in
Articial Intelligence and Applications, 152:41-50, 2006.
• M. Palmirani, R. Brighi, and M. Massini. Processing normative
references on the basis of natural language questions. In
Proceedings. 15th International Workshop on Database and
Expert Systems Applications, 2004., pages 9-12, Aug 2004.
• Oanh Thi Tran, Bach Xuan Ngo, Minh Le Nguyen, and Akira
Shimazu. Automated reference resolution in legal texts. Articial
Intelligence and Law, 22(1):29-60, Mar 2014.
33

34. LawORDate:
a Service for Distinguishing
Legal References from
Temporal Expressions
María Navas-Loro
mnavas@fi.upm.es
TeReCom (JURIX), 13th December 2017
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain)
LAW DATEOR