A methodology based on commonsense knowledge and ontologies for the automatic classification of legal cases

We describe a methodology for the automatic classification of legal cases expressed in natural language, which relies on existing legal ontologies and a commonsense knowledge base. This methodology is founded on a process consisting of three phases: an enrichment of a given legal ontology by associating its terms with topics retrieved from the Wikipedia knowledge base; an extraction of relevant concepts from a given textual legal case; and a matching between the enriched ontological terms and the extracted concepts. Such a process has been successfully implemented in a corresponding tool that is part of a larger framework for self-litigation and legal support for the Italian law. © 2014 ACM