Automatic Taxonomy Generation - A Use-Case in the Legal Domain

TL;DR

This paper presents a methodology for automatically generating legal concept taxonomies from legal texts, aiming to facilitate easier access to legal knowledge without manual expert intervention.

Contribution

It introduces and compares two automated approaches for creating legal taxonomies from statutory texts, reducing reliance on manual expert construction.

Findings

Two approaches successfully generate legal taxonomies

Approaches perform well across different UK legal corpora

Automated method reduces manual effort in taxonomy creation

Abstract

A key challenge in the legal domain is the adaptation and representation of the legal knowledge expressed through texts, in order for legal practitioners and researchers to access this information easier and faster to help with compliance related issues. One way to approach this goal is in the form of a taxonomy of legal concepts. While this task usually requires a manual construction of terms and their relations by domain experts, this paper describes a methodology to automatically generate a taxonomy of legal noun concepts. We apply and compare two approaches on a corpus consisting of statutory instruments for UK, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland laws.