Our legal expert system KONTERM contains a selective thesaurus and a knowledge base for the automatic representation of the structure and the contents of the document. The thesaurus takes into account the necessary degree of formalism of legal language and therefore overcomes the untidiness of natural language and represents automatically the expert knowledge of a lawyer about legal terminology. The required selectivity of the individual descriptors is achieved by distinguishing between precise legal terms and words with fuzzy meanings as well as by detecting hidden word senses. This thesaurus, together with the expert rules for structuring the document, provides the user with an analytical document representation. In addition to that, hypertext links will be supplemented in order to offer the lawyer a convenient tool for efficient information retrieval.
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