Treatment of Legal Sentences Including Itemization Written in Japanese, English and Vietnamese —Towards Translation into Logical Forms

This paper reports how to treat legal sentences including itemized expressions in three languages. Thus far, we have developed a system for translating legal sentences into logical formulae. Although our system basically converts words and phrases in a target sentence into predicates in a logical formula, it generates some useless predicates for itemized and referential expressions. In the previous study, focusing on Japanese Law, we have made a front end system which substitutes corresponding referent phrases for these expressions. In this paper, we examine our approach to the Vietnamese Law and the United States Code. Our linguistic analysis shows the difference in notation among languages or nations, and we extracted conventional expressions denoting itemization for each language. The experimental result shows high accuracy in terms of generating independent, plain sentences from the law articles including itemization. The proposed system generates a meaningful text with high readability, which can be input into our translation system.