Toward a Bilingual Legal Term Glossary from Context Profiles

Toward A Bilingual Legal Term Glossary from Context Profiles Oi Yee KWONG Language Information Sciences Research Centre City University of Hong Kong Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong rlolivia@cityu.edu.hk Abstract We propose an algorithm for the automatic acquisition of a bilingual lexicon in the legal domain. We make use of a parallel corpus of bilingual court judgments, aligned to the sentence level, and analyse the bilingual context profiles to extract corresponding legal terms in both languages. Our method is different from those in past studies as it does not require any prior knowledge source, and naturally extends to multi-word terms in either language. A pilot test was done with a sample of ten legal terms, each with ten or more occurrences in the data. Encouraging results of about 75% average accuracy were obtained. This figure does not only reflect the effectiveness of the method for bilingual lexicon acquisition, but also its potential for bilingual alignment at the word or expression level. 1� Introduction In this study, we propose an approach for acquiring legal term translations from parallel corpora, by analysing bilingual context profiles. Following the implementation of legal bilingualism in the 90's, Hong Kong has experienced an increasing demand for authentic and high quality legal texts in both Chinese and English. In view of this, the Electronic Legal Documentation/Corpus System (ELDoS) project was initiated in 2000.1 ELDoS is essentially a bilingual legal document retrieval system which provides a handy reference for the preparation of legal texts, Chinese judgments in particular (Kwong and Luk, 2001; LISRC, 2001). The data in ELDoS come from two sources: a parallel corpus of original court judgment texts, in Chinese and English, and a bilingual glossary of legal terms derived from these judgments. According to many legal professionals, different terminologies are in fact used for different genres of legal documents such as statutes, judgments, and contracts. Hence for robustness and authenticity, the glossary in ELDoS is based on the corpus rather than any existing bilingual legal dictionary. The compilation of the bilingual glossary from the judgments is thus one of the main tasks in the project. However, identification of legal terms and relevant concepts by humans depends to a large extent on their sensitivity which is, in turn, based on personal experience and legal knowledge. So not only is the process labour intensive, the results are also seriously prone to inconsistency. More importantly, inconsistency is to be avoided in the legal domain where language use should be precise and absolute. Naturally, one way to facilitate the process is to seek automatic means to extract the relevant bilingual terms from texts. Past studies in this area mostly dealt with English and other Indo-European languages, and only few with English and Chinese. In this study, we start with a list of Chinese legal terms extracted by a simple but effective method tailored to the characteristics of Chinese legal texts (Kwong and Tsou, 2001). For each of these ELDoS is a joint project between the City University of Hong …

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