Legal Language and Legal Knowledge Management Applications

This work is an investigation into the peculiarities of legal language with respect to ordinary language. Based on the idea that a shallow parsing approach can help to provide enough detailed linguistic information, this work presents the results obtained by shallow parsing (i.e. chunking) corpora of Italian and English legal texts and comparing them with corpora of ordinary language. In particular, this paper puts the emphasis of how understanding the syntactic and lexical characteristics of this specialised language has practical importance in the development of domain-specific Knowledge Management applications.