TempCourt: evaluation of temporal taggers on a new corpus of court decisions

Abstract

The extraction and processing of temporal expressions (TEs) in textual documents have been extensively studied in several domains; however, for the legal domain it remains an open challenge. This is possibly due to the scarcity of corpora in the domain and the particularities found in legal documents that are highlighted in this paper. Considering the pivotal role played by temporal information when it comes to analyzing legal cases, this paper presents TempCourt, a corpus of 30 legal documents from the European Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Justice, and the United States Supreme Court with manually annotated TEs. The corpus contains two different temporal annotation sets that adhere to the TimeML standard, the first one capturing all TEs and the second dedicated to TEs that are relevant for the case under judgment (thus excluding dates of previous court decisions). The proposed gold standards are subsequently used to compare ten state-of-the-art cross-domain temporal taggers, and to identify not only the limitations of cross-domain temporal taggers but also limitations of the TimeML standard when applied to legal documents. Finally, the paper identifies the need for dedicated resources and the adaptation of existing tools, and specific annotation guidelines that can be adapted to different types of legal documents.

WhenTheFact: Extracting Events from European Legal Decisions

“…Based on a previous works about temporal expressions in the legal domain [11], first step for building a knowledge graph was to decide the source of the documents, since there are important differences among jurisdictions, even when they share the language. Due to the ease of importing and reusing judgments from their respective repositories, as well as the multilingual challenge it offers and the possible associated documents that could eventually be added to a knowledge graph, we decided to work with decisions from European courts, namely the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and European Court of Justice (ECJ).…”

Events Matter: Extraction of Events from Court Decisions

“…Regarding corpora in the legal domain, court decisions of the ECHR have also been used in literature for different tasks [18,19]. Nevertheless, very few annotated corpora from the legal domain have been made available, and to the best of our knowledge none of them considers events.…”

“…This includes court procedures (legal proceedings stricto sensu), but also actions that trigger procedural effects. A further analysis of this distinction can be found in previous literature [6,18]. In the paragraph at stake, we annotated as event the whole sentence, being its type procedure.…”

Türkçe Zamansal İfadelerin Yakalanması ve Tanımlanması

“…Başta İngilizce olmak üzere birçok dil için zamansal ifadelerin analizi üzerine çalışmalar yapılmış ve yapılmaktadır [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Bunun yanında, özellikle İngilizce odaklı olmak üzere birçok zamansal ifade etiketleyicisi bulunmaktadır; DANTE [11], Trips/Trios [12], HeidelTime [13], SUTime [14] bunlardan bazılarıdır.…”