definition_extraction

Given a sentence from a Supreme Court opinion offering a definition of a term, extract the term being defined.

Source: Kevin Tobia

Task summary: Extract the term being defined in sentences from Supreme Court opinions.

Size (samples): 696

Legal reasoning type: Rhetorical-analysis

Task type: Extraction

Task description

Courts frequently define terms in the course of interpreting and applying laws. For instance, the following sentence provides a definition of the term “confidential”:

The term “confidential” meant then, as it does now, “private” or “secret.” Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary 174 (1963). And here is a sentence defining “brought”: But a natural reading of § 27's text does not extend so far. “Brought” in this context means “commenced,” Black's Law Dictionary 254 (3d ed. 1933).

The goal of this task is to identify, from a sentence defining a term, the term that is being defined. A challenge is that defining sentences may not explicitly use quotations to denote the term being defined. For example, the following sentence defines “vacation”:

A vacation is defined by Bouvier to be the period of time between the end of one term and the beginning of another.

Task construction

This task was constructed by hand-coding sentences from Supreme Court opinions.