Semantic annotation of Italian legal texts: a FrameNet-based approach

The FrameNet approach to text semantic annotation can be a reliable model to make explicit the linguistic information and the semantic content of legal texts. This hypothesis is discussed and empirically demonstrated through an experiment of annotation of a corpus of Italian legal texts. This study is aimed at showing how FrameNet is particularly appropriate in order to provide new perspectives for legal language studies and for legal knowledge representation tasks. Moreover, by relying on the output of an automatic dependency parser, the FrameNet-based annotation methodology presented here is meant to be succesfully used in automatic semantic processing tasks of legal texts.