Using NLP Techniques to Identify Legal Ontology Components: Concepts and Relations

A method to identify ontology components is presented in this article. The method relies on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to extract concepts and relations among these concepts. This method is applied in the legal field to build an ontology dedicated to information retrieval. Legal texts on which the method is performed are carefully chosen as describing and conceptualizing the legal domain. We suggest that this method can help legal ontology designers and may be used while building ontologies dedicated to other tasks than information retrieval.