Semantic roles of legal concepts

Abstract

In this article, we present the semantic roles applied to legal concepts. As we are limited by the content of corpora which were established for the purpose of this research, we create our own set of semantic roles which is adapted to our data. We then proceed to analyse three groups of concepts whose nature is different: the first of the groups concerns concepts-persons, the second one concepts-things, and the third one concepts-legal institutions. We examine the semantic roles identified by each group, the distribution and the frequency of the roles, and other phenomena. We work with the same thematic domain of Czech and French law thanks to which it is possible to compare the results in a contrastive way.

Keywords

• semantic roles
• legal concepts
• legal terms
• conceptual fields