Multilingual Conceptual Dictionaries Based on Ontologies : Analytical Tools and Case Studies

This paper describes the philosophy behind our tool called "Legal Taxonomy Syllabus", the analytical instruments it provides and some case stud- ies. The Legal Taxonomy Syllabus is an ontology based tool designed to annotate and recover multi-lingua legal information and build conceptual dictionaries. The Legal Taxonomy Syllabus allows to build legal dictionaries in a bottom up fashion starting from the annotation of legal terms by lawyers and to let ontologist refine the resulting taxonomies of concepts. The Legal Taxonomy Syllabus and its analytical tools provide help to lawyers to study the peculiarities of European Union Directives concerning the polysemy of legal terms, and the terminological and conceptual mis- alignment. By means of two case studies we show how the Legal Taxonomy Syllabus can helps the process of drafting and translating the Directives.