This third issue of the EUCases Newsletter, although being a page shorter than normal, covers quite a variety of topics. Starting with an impression from the first 2015 General Assembly in Freiburg, it goes on to Livio Robaldo being awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions Research Fellowship. Then there is the outlook (and invitation) to the 2015 Recent Advances in Natural Language

Processing (NLP) conference in Hissar, Bulgaria in September, where EUCases will support a workshop on language and semantics technology in the legal domain. Three months before that, on June 24th in Sofia, there will be the second International EUCases Expert Workshop. This newsletter will be wrapped up with a short summary of recent EUCases project deliverables and tools.

3rd GA in Freiburg | Congrats Livio | Conferences and Workshops

No. 3, March 2015

Newsletter

This is the third newsletter of the EUCases project. Since the project’s start in October 2013, quite a lot of work has been done, and we want to continously present some of the achievements so far. During the project’s duration of 24 months, more newsletters will be published on a regular basis.

About the newsletter

1The EUCases Project Newsletter

ContactEUCases Project Office empirica Gesellschaft für Kommuni-kations- und Technologieforschung mbHOxfordstr. 253111 BonnGermany+49 228 985 30 0e-Mail: eucases@empirica.com

Parts of the team enjoying the sun in the Breisgau.

2 The EUCases Project Newsletter

The EU Cases Project Newsletter - No. 3

Congrats, Livio!

Recent Advances in NLP 2015| Workshop LST4LD

emdees CC BY 2.0

Livio Robaldo, who is responsible of the NLP Toolkit within EUCases, was granted a Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions Research Fellowship for his project ProLeMAS: Processing Legal Text in Multi Agent Systems. ProLeMAS will start with the Akoma Ntoso documents and will build deontic logical formulae on them.

Livio’s project is drawn on EUCases, which was mentioned several times in the project proposal. The proposal itself was evaluated achieving 96.4 out of 100 points.

The Marie-Curie Fellowship is regarded as one of Europe’s most competi-tive and presti-gious awards.

During his fellowship, Livio will be spending 18 months at the University of Luxembourg and a further 6 months at EUCases’ partner APIS in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Again, congratulations Livio from all your EUCases partners and colleagues!

The ancient city of Hissar in Bulgaria will host the 2015 RANLP conference. EUCases supports its LST4LD work-

shop.

The legal domain has always been attractive for language and semantic technology because of its importance for the society with respect to globalisation and common markets as well as for its challenges for formalisation and specific language use. On the one hand, in recent years the EU has delivered huge amounts of resources on EU law in many languages (such as, EuroParl, JRC, etc.). On the other hand, the matured NLP and Semantic Web technologies provide a good inventory for formalizing the law data in the form of domain ontologies; for automating the process of relevant knowledge extraction from legal documents and for representing it in form of Linked Data in RDF. This will support better search possibilities and a better presentation of the legal information to professional and non-professional stakeholders.

LST4LD: Language and SemanticS technoLogy for LegaL domain

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers in the areas of NLP, semantic technologies, legal domain modeling and reasoning as well as practitioners in the area of legal data processing, publishing, etc. to present and discuss their recent developments in this interdisciplinary area. The topics of

interest are as follows, but not limited to:• Ontological modeling of legal data• Legal reasoning• Language technologies for

processing of legal texts• Adaptation of language processing

modules to legal domain• Extraction of legal Named entities -

legal citations, etc.• Legal search engines - requirements,

implementations, etc.• Legislation and case law corpora in

Linked Open Data

The workshop is organised by EUCases partners and the Linguistic Modelling Department at the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

It will take place as part of the 2015 Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing Conference on 10-11 September in Hissar, Bulgaria. For more information see http://lml.bas.bg/ranlp2015.

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The EUCases Prject Newsletter No. 3

New EUCases results and deliverables

An overview on the Torino Workshop, all the presentations and CVs can be found at http://eucases.eu/1st_workshop/

Coming up: 2nd International Expert Workshop in SofiaIn order to bring together representatives of key stakeholder groups from policy, legislative bodies, judiciary, academia and industry, a workshop will be organised in Sofia on June 24th 2015.

More information on the workshop will be available on our website shortly.

If you are interested in attending the workshop, please get in touch with us!

Bulgaria’s capital of Sofia will host the second Inter-national Expert Workshop in June 2015.

•Report on Tools for Classification and Summarisation – This document describes the current develop-ment status of the modules for semantic classification and case summarization. The semantic classification module relates the texts to EuroVoc terms, thus detects the respective in-domain

data. A model was created for each of the following languages: English, French, Bulgarian, Italian and German. The averaged metrics over all these languages showed improve-ments in comparison to the current state-of-the-art. The summarisation is based on key term extraction. The multilingual test corpora, based on crawled data, are presented for test-ing the sentence splitting, concept mapping and summarisation. Both pre-processing steps are improved: sentence splitting via the addition of tuning rules, and concept map-

ping – by means of terminology curation. The TextRank approach for keyword (descriptor) extraction is described with respect to configura-tion and implementation settings. Additionally, a quality assessment procedure is suggested for validating the automatically generated sum-maries. The modules for classifica-tion and summarization have been implemented in UIMA.

• Report on Linking Tools – The docu-ment describes the implementation details on accessing the modules for Semantic Classification and Case Summarisation within the EUCases project. Parameters and software for accessing, configuration and testing of the implemented software and services are introduced.

All public deliverables can be download-ed at http://eucases.eu/deliverables.

Graeme Churchard CC BY 2.0

GA in FreiburgOn the 6th and 7th of February, the first General Assembly 2015 took place in Freiburg, Germany, the home of EUCases partner Averbis. Welcomed by sunny weather, the first day comprised highly motivational discussions with industry and publishers. They showed great interest in all what EUCases partners are doing, and further cooperation seems possible. The second day was much influenced by plans for service development and testing and user validation. EUCases is on track for a successful last quarter of the project.