A Query System for Extracting Requirements-Related Information from Legal Texts

Searching legal texts for relevant information is a complex and expensive activity. The search solutions offered by present-day legal portals are targeted primarily at legal professionals. These solutions are not adequate for requirements analysts whose objective is to extract domain knowledge including stakeholders, rights and duties, and business processes that are relevant to legal requirements. Semantic Web technologies now enable smart search capabilities and can be exploited to help requirements analysts in elaborating legal requirements. In our previous work, we developed an automated framework for extracting semantic metadata from legal texts. In this paper, we investigate the use of our metadata extraction framework as an enabler for smart legal search with a focus on requirements engineering activities. We report on our industrial experience helping the Government of Luxembourg provide an advanced search facility over Luxembourg's Income Tax Law. The experience shows that semantic legal metadata can be successfully exploited for answering requirements engineering-related legal queries. Our results also suggest that our conceptualization of semantic legal metadata can be further improved with new information elements and relations.