In this paper we report on our recent work in clause alignment for English-Chinese legal texts using available lexical resources including a bilingual legal glossary and a bilingual dictionary, for the purpose of acquiring examples at various linguistic levels for example-based machine translation. We present our formulation of an appropriate measure for the similarity of a candidate pair of clauses with respect to matched lexical items and the corresponding implementation of an effective algorithm for clause alignment based on this similarity measure. Experimental results show that the similarity measure and the lexical-based clause alignment algorithm, though very simple, are very effective, with a performance of 94.6% alignment accuracy. It confirms our intuition that lexical information gives a reliable indication of correct alignment. The significance of this lexical-based approach lies in both its simplicity and effectiveness.

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Dialogue is of cardinal importance in maintaining the interpersonal relationship between judges and facilitating judgment drafting as collaborative problem solving. It is also important for the check and balance between courts and the legislature. A court judgment can therefore be taken as a dialogue between judges as well as that between courts and the legislature. Based on the analysis of some judgments in Hong Kong, the purpose of the paper is to exemplify rhetorical preferences of the dialogue and to unravel the underlying pragmatic rationale. The paper further identifies rhetorical strategies such as modality and intertextuality as creating space for dialogue.