NLP Challenges for Eunomos, a Tool to Build and Manage Legal Knowledge

In this paper, we describe how NLP can semi-automate the construction and analysis of knowledge in Eunomos, a legal knowledge management service which enables users to view legislation from various sources and ?nd the right de?nitions and explanations of legal concepts in a given context. NLP can semi-automate some routine tasks currently performed by knowledge engineers, such as classifying norms, or linking key terms within legislation to ontological concepts. This helps overcome the resource bottleneck problem of creating specialist knowledge management systems. While accuracy is of the utmost importance in the legal domain, and the information should be veri?ed by domain experts as a matter of course, a semi-automated approach can result in considerable ef?ciency gains.