Identifying Causal Relations in Legal Documents with Dependency Syntactic Analysis

This article describes a method for enriching a dependency-based parser with causal connectors. Our specific objective is to identify causal relationships between elementary discourse units in Spanish legal texts. For this purpose, the approach we follow is to search for specific discourse connectives which are taken as causal dependencies relating an effect event (head) with a verbal or nominal cause (dependent). As a result, we turn a specific syntactic parser into a discourse parser aimed at recognizing causal structures.