What we do - profile

The project is a follow-up to the results of the GAČR grant - Law Electronic Dictionary (hereinafter referred to as PES) and the Strategie21 project (AcademicLex - ALX programme) supported by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Within the framework of the project (PES), a programme and database for 8 legal branches with over 10,000 entries and 60,000 links between them was created in cooperation with the Faculty of Informatics of MU Brno (hereinafter referred to as FI MU Brno), the Institute for the Czech Language of the CAS (hereinafter referred to as IJČ AV ČR) and the Institute of State and Law of the CAS (hereinafter referred to as ISP AV ČR). The purpose of the dictionary is to cover the conceptual structure of the main branches of law, i.e. in the final stage the programme should contain around 100,000 entries. In contrast to classical dictionaries, PES focuses primarily on capturing the relationships between the legal terms characterising the different legal branches, such as: synonymy, contradictory links, associative links and structural rubric links (the so-called legal ontology). The structure of the database also includes the decomposition of headwords and definitions into atomic terms and sub-phrases. The dictionary now has 30,000 entries from 9 legal fields.

The team is currently working on expanding and testing the dictionary for the fields of Roman law, legal theory, legal philosophy, Islamic law and legislation.

The AcademicLex programme is regularly updated and supplemented with lectures, classic textbooks and works created at the PF ZČU (e.g. Legislation, History of Legal Ideologies, Digitization of Law, Legal Informatics, etc.). The ALX programme links legislation, case law and doctrine, including a connection with the American Perseus system (classical texts in Greek and English).  ALX includes videos demonstrating how to work with the system.  

ALX and PES are now routinely used in the teaching of legal theory, legal philosophy, legislation, Roman law and legal informatics, i.e. 1000 users each year. In this sense, the PF ZČU uses specialized programs the most of all law faculties in the Czech Republic.

Theoretical and practical applicability

There can be little doubt about the need to create and maintain electronic legal dictionaries and legal information systems. It should be remembered that classic legal dictionaries usually have around 5,000 entries, usually with no interrelationships. Their purpose is to define the correct usage of basic legal terms and thus to act normatively. The aim of electronic dictionaries is different. The purpose of electronic dictionaries is to provide information on the use of legal terms and, above all, on their interrelationships. The object of the structural analysis is legal texts of representative textbooks and legal regulations. The legal field at the level of standard representative textbooks usually has between 2,000 and 5,000 entries and around 20,000 interrelations. It is therefore clear that this is a long-term and, in fact, never definitively ending task. Therefore, the first step is to work out the basics of several branches, to create the structure of the database and the retrieval program (this was done in the PES project). The advantage of this project is its immediate applicability and the possibility of testing it in the context of legal education or, once the branches are complete, its applicability to the general legal public. The project includes the creation of corpora of legal rules and case law (see PES). In this latter sense, it is an impetus for legal language theory at the level of basic research. However, the project has a number of other effects, e.g. use in legal information systems searches, automatic analysis of legal texts, automatic indexing of legal literature, comparative analysis of legislation, support for legislation, etc.

Tasks currently being solved

The team is currently working on:

• adding to the database, fixing bugs, improving the program;
• updating legal corpora
• developing programmes for the needs of teaching Legislation
• Use of the programme to support students' preparation for exams.

The progress of the work is related to the state of our legal system, where a number of new laws have been adopted that have fundamentally changed the terminology currently in force. The advantage of the PES and ALX programs is that they are completely independent and specialized for the needs of law education. In our opinion, the pandemic period has shown that further development will not go the way of general programmes, but of programmes specialised in particular fields, i.e. 'tailor-made'.   

What we offer

The team made PES and ALX available for teaching purposes. The PES program is publicly and free of charge available on WEB, after registration. As PES does not only cover the legal terms of the industry, but also the structure of their interrelationships, it is an important tool for students to get an idea of the standard ontology of the industry.

The database itself creates extensive material for legal language research for both basic research and for student work of all types, including Ph.D.

The project on legal electronic dictionary and legal language has extensive possible applications. We are cooperating with FI MU Brno in improving the operation of the system and preparing cooperation with the Czech National Corpus in the field of special legal corpora. We expect to use the databases for basic research, e.g. in the field of legislation. Similarly, legal sector dictionaries can be used in improving NovaVoice products, or as a data base for legal language in projects of the Department of Cybernetics of the Faculty of Law of the Czech University of Technology (team of Prof. Josef Psutka, CSc.).

The ALX program is distributed either on networks or individually, i.e. students download the entire program to their computers from the server of the Institute of Computer Science of the CAS and can work with it independently on the Internet. This is a good practice, due to the situation when especially in border areas, trains, etc. the Internet is not well accessible.  Due to the numbering of texts, ALX occupies only 10 GB.    

 

What is our history

The core of the team is identical to the staff involved in the PES project (Dr. Novák, Dr. Cvrček and Dr. Šejvl). This ensures continuity of work. Dr. Dostalík, Dr. Bezoušková and Dr. Jermanová are the staff members who cooperated with the above-mentioned in the framework of the OP VK project "Cooperating Lawyers".

Dr. Cvrček and Dr. Novák founded the teaching of legal informatics in the Czech Republic and the subject of Legislation at PF ZČU. Both of them led teams of workers who created a database of 200,000 metadata and 100,000 full texts on legal documents at the Institute of the CAS, which became the basis for the ALX program (Dr. Novák has unfortunately passed away). Dr. Cvrček is a student of Prof. Viktor Knapp and together with Dr. Novák was involved in this field since 1985 at the Institute of the CAS. Both of them are authors of dozens of papers in this field (see e.g. ASEP or RIV) and a number of grants of the CAS and GAČR (see CVs and publications). Traditionally, we cooperate in teams together with the staff of FI MU Brno or the Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the Czech National Corpus of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, as well as Novasoft and others. We have participated in the European LOIS project and maintain contacts with a number of European legal informatics laboratories (e.g. the Instituto per la Documentazione Giuridica CNR (hereinafter IDG) in Florence). The results of the PES project were presented at the World Conference (ELRA): LanguageResources and Evaluation (LREC) in Istanbul (2012) and Reykjavik, (2014). In addition to basic research and publications, we are co-authors of a number of legal information programs (CS LEGSYS, LEGSYS, LexGalaxy, etc.).

Dr. Šejvl participated in the PES project in the area of translations, i.e. English equivalents of passwords, by preparing the textbook History of Legal Teachings (see ALX) and passwords related to the rule of law (PES). P. Rychlý has been regular since 2004. The team is compact with many years of experience and its employees are thoroughly familiar with the methodology of data processing and operation of programs.