Temporal Dependence in Legal Documents

Abstract

Tasks and difficulties inherent in the largely open problem of temporal information extraction from legal text are outlined. We demonstrate the efficacy of tools and concepts available ?off-the-shelf? and suggest refinements for such applications. In particular, the frequent references between regulatory texts have to be addressed as a separate named entity recognition task that bears relevance to an analysis of the temporal ordering of legislation. A regular expression-based approach as a robust first step towards addressing this problem is tested.