EU Wordnet

 

The EU Wordnet search utility, still under development, uses the multi-lingual thesaurus from the LOIS project (Lexical Ontologies for Legal Information Sharing). Available from Search all - Advanced search, this multi-lingual lexicon provides translations, descriptions and related items of legal terms in 6 languages. It is also useful in retrieving documents in the database (e.g. merger decisions) that may not be in English.

Using EU Wordnet:

• click EU Wordnet in Search all - Advanced search
• in the EU Wordnet window select the language of your search term
• type in your search term, e.g. mietvertrag
• select the language for translation and click View
• you can also select which language you would like to search in
• a list of results and related terms plus a brief description is displayed
• you can further expand the list of related terms until you find the correct word for your search strategy
• check the box and click a term to paste it to the search term box
• you can select more than one term, terms are linked by default by the boolean operator OR
• use the breadcrumbs in the Previous searches box to return to an earlier search
• click Use Selected Terms to paste your search term(s) to Free text search field the search form
• complete your search strategy and click
• the EU Wordnet window remains open until you close it.

 

LOIS Project

The LOIS project, an European eContent project financially supported by the European Commission, was launched in 2004. LOIS is a new international research project on multi-lingual information retrieval from legal databases. The project is an initiative of a consortium of ten leading research and business partners, including ELLIS Publications, from six European countries.

The aim of the LOIS project is to develop a multi-lingual access facility for European legal databases. This will enable citizens and professional users to search for European legislation and other legal documents (such as court cases) across six European languages (Italian, English, German, Czech, Portuguese and Dutch). To achieve this goal the project will use formal representations of legal concepts in each language using the WordNet technique. The partner Research Center for Computers and Law at the University of Vienna is carrying out the localization of the German legal WordNet. Similar concepts in different languages (synsets) will be cross linked in such a way that users can enter queries to a legal documentation base into his/her language and retrieve also documents written in different languages. The research results will be taken on by the industry partners in the LOIS consortium to develop actual information products for European citizens.

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