Events in the legal domain: first impressions

Dealing with events is a challenging task in Artificial Intelligence; just trying to define what is an event and deciding what information should be considered relevant to it is a difficult and domain dependent endeavour. Despite this task has been already tackled in the legal domain, no consensual definition nor standard representation for legal events has been established yet. In this paper, we analyze current approaches to event representation and extraction in the legal domain, and we review generic approaches as well. We expose our first impressions derived therefrom, and we offer a first round of event annotations of judgments of the European Court of Justice. Aspects such as the concept of relevance are discussed, along with choices for evaluation. Possible strategies for extraction of legal events are described. Finally, a roadmap for a formal, complete definition and delimitation of events in the legal domain is presented.