A Middle-out Approach for Building a Legal domain ontology in Arabic

Introducing ontology in information retrieval provides the obvious benefit of higher precision and addresses other common issues such as information quality and user adaptation. However, the main disadvantage is the costs (i.e., time and effort) of manually constructing an ontology and of its representativeness of the specified domain. This paper considers the ontology construction process and proposes a middle-out approach that allows the construction of a well-founded ontology speedily. The domain application that interests us is Moroccan commercial law. The ontology to be built aims to support users in describing a specific legal situation and retrieving the relevant legal articles and court decisions in similar cases. The proposed approach combines a top-down and bottom-up strategy. The first allows us to define an ontological model of the legal domain by reusing an existing core ontology, whereas the second populates and refines this model based on an ontology-learning process from Arabic texts.