Towards a FrameNet Resource for the Legal Domain

In the AI&Law community, the importance of frame-based ontologies has been acknowledged since the early 90\u27s with the Van Kralingen\u27s proposal of a frame language for legal knowledge representation. This still appears to be a strongly felt need within the community. In this paper, we propose to face this need by developing a FrameNet resource for the legal domain based on Fillmore\u27s Frame Semantics, whose final outocme will include a frame-based lexical ontology and a legal corpus annotated with frame information. In particular, the paper focuses on methodological and design issues, ranging from the customization and extension of the general FrameNet for the legal domain to the linking of the developed resource with already existing Legal Ontologies