This paper deals with the use of computational linguistic analysis techniques for information access and ontology learning within the legal domain. We present a rule-based approach for extracting and analysing definitions from parsed text and evaluate it on a corpus of about 6000 German court decisions. The results are applied to improve the quality of a text based ontology learning method on this corpus.

This paper describes research within the project CORTE funded by the German Science Foundation, DFG PI 154/10-1 (http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/projects/corte/)