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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2019

María Navas-Loro Open the ORCID record for María Navas-Loro [Opens in a new window] ,
Erwin Filtz Open the ORCID record for Erwin Filtz [Opens in a new window] ,
Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel Open the ORCID record for Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel [Opens in a new window] ,
Axel Polleres Open the ORCID record for Axel Polleres [Opens in a new window]  and
Sabrina Kirrane Open the ORCID record for Sabrina Kirrane [Opens in a new window]
María Navas-Loro
Affiliation:
D3206 – Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Montegancedo Campus, Madrid, Spain e-mails: mnavas@fi.upm.es, vrodriguez@fi.upm.es
Erwin Filtz
Affiliation:
Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria e-mails: Erwin.Filtz@wu.ac.at, Axel.Polleres@wu.ac.at, Sabrina.Kirrane@wu.ac.at
Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel
Affiliation:
D3206 – Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Montegancedo Campus, Madrid, Spain e-mails: mnavas@fi.upm.es, vrodriguez@fi.upm.es
Axel Polleres
Affiliation:
Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria e-mails: Erwin.Filtz@wu.ac.at, Axel.Polleres@wu.ac.at, Sabrina.Kirrane@wu.ac.at
Sabrina Kirrane
Affiliation:
Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria e-mails: Erwin.Filtz@wu.ac.at, Axel.Polleres@wu.ac.at, Sabrina.Kirrane@wu.ac.at
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Knowledge Engineering Review , Volume 34 , 2019 , e24
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

The two first authors equally contributed to this work.

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