Crime Knowledge Extraction: an Ontology-driven Approach for Detecting Abstract Terms in Case Law Decisions

In this paper, we present CRIKE, a data-science approach to automatically detect concrete applications of legal abstract terms in case-law decisions. To this purpose, CRIKE relies on the use of the LATO ontology where legal abstract terms are properly formalized as concepts and relations among concepts. Using LATO, CRIKE aims at discovering how and where legal abstract terms are applied by judges in their legal argumentation. Moreover, we detect the terminology used in the text of case-law decisions to characterize concrete abstract-term instances. A case-study on a case-law decisions dataset provided by the Court of Milan, Italy, is also discussed.