<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W04-1006">
  <Title>Legal Texts Summarization by Exploration of the Thematic Structures and Argumentative Roles</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2 Context of the Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In Canada, the Canadian Legal Information Institute project (CANLII) aims at gathering legislative and judicial texts, as well as legal commentaries, from federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions in order to make primary sources of Canadian law accessible for free on the Internet (http://www.canlii.org). The large volume of legal information in electronic form creates a need for the creation and production of powerful computational tools in order to extract relevant information in a condensed form.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> But why are we interested in the processing of previous legal decisions and in their summaries? First, because a court order generally gives a solution to a legal problem between two or several parties. The decision also contains the reasons which justify the solution and constitute a law jurisprudence precedent from which it is possible to extract a legal rule that can be applied to similar cases. To find a solution to a legal problem not directly indicated in the law, lawyers look for precedents of similar cases. For a single query in a data base of law reports, we often receive hundreds of documents that are very long to study for which legal experts and law students request summaries. In Quebec REJB (R'epertoire 'electronique de jurisprudence du Barreau) and SOQUIJ (Soci'et'e qu'eb'ecoise d'information juridique) are two organizations which provide manual summaries for legal resources, but the human time and expertise required makes their services very expensive. For example the price of only one summary with its full text, provided by SOQUIJ is 7.50 $ can. Some legal information systems have been developed by private companies like QuickLaw in Canada and WEST-LAW and LEXIS in the United States, however no existing system completely satisfies the specific requirements of this field.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> One reason for the difficulty of this work is the complexity of the domain: specific vocabularies of Between:</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>