An ontology-based approach to the multilingual complexity of law

The aim of this article is to set out methodological routes for constructing legal ontologies in applications that, due to the tasks they intend to achieve, should maintain a clear reference to the source texts. Considering the complexity of the legal domain, methodologies based on ontology learning techniques seem to be the most promising way to fill the gap between dogmatic conceptual models and lexical patterns extracted from texts by combining lexical information and formal semantics, by codifying relations between concepts, their linguistic realisations and the contexts that contain them. To grasp the characteristics of the legal world, such a methodology requires specific approaches able to capture the multi-layered structure of the discourse, the extensional semantics of open textured concepts and the ontological characterisation of the interpretative process in concepts construction.