Abstract
The work presented in this Chapter was designed for the purposes of a specific European project, named “CrossJustice” (hereinafter cj). The first part of the Chapter focuses on the modelling of definitions within the six procedural European Union Directives, which were the focus of the research project. The goal is that of illustrating the steps and the challenges towards the construction of a lightweight ontology representing this information. The process of building the ontology revealed a number of aspects that present opportunities for further research. In the second part, an automatic experimentation concerning the harmonization of EU directives is presented, built on top of an automatic analysis of national implementations for each pair of states to investigate the similarity of the corresponding texts. The applied text mining and natural language processing techniques then culminate in the computation of the cosine similarity between vectors associated with legal texts. On that basis, an aggregated index approximates the degree of harmonization within the six EU Directives.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Effective Protection of the Rights of the Accused in the EU Directives |
| Subtitle of host publication | A Computable Approach to Criminal Procedure Law |
| Editors | Giuseppe Contissa, Giulia Lasagni, Michele Caianiello, Giovanni Sartor |
| Place of Publication | Leiden |
| Publisher | Koninklijke Brill NV |
| Chapter | 16 |
| Pages | 309–328 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-90-04-51339-6 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-90-04-51338-9 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2022 |