Signal Phrase Extraction - A Gateway to Information Retrieval Improvement in Law Texts.

NLP-based techniques can support in improving understanding of legal text documents. In this work we present a semi-automatic framework to extract signal phrases from legislative texts for an arbitrary European language. Through a case study using Dutch legislation, we demonstrate that it is feasible to extract these phrases reliably with a small number of supporting domain experts. Finally, we argue how in future works our framework could be utilized with existing methods to be applied to different languages.