Automatic Taxonomy Generation: A Use-Case in the Legal Domain

A key challenge in the legal domain is the adaptation and representation of the legal knowledge expressed through texts, in order for legal practitioners and researchers to access this information more easily and faster to help with compliance related issues. One way to approach this goal is in the form of a taxonomy of legal concepts. While this task usually requires a manual construction of terms and their relations by domain experts, this paper describes a methodology to automatically generate a taxonomy of legal noun concepts. We apply and compare two approaches on a corpus consisting of statutory instruments for UK, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland laws.