Kanunum (Karakullukcu Consulting Inc) is a Turkish language technologies firm and a digital legal publisher. Over the past decade, Kanunum has worked with NLP specialists producing Turkish language stemmer/analyzer applications as well as named entity recognition and sentiment recognition techniques, building on the work of these specialists and carrying out new research in the area. Turkish legal texts have been used as training data in these projects. Apart from language technologies, Kanunum's R&D works have sought to reduce human involvement in the expansion and daily maintenance of a database of legal texts.
The LT techniques developed have been showcased in the electronic legal search tool "Kanunum.com", a for-fee legal database service for legal professionals. As a legal informatics project Kanunum.com was launched in 2008 and became available for users in 2012. Over the years, a number of leading law firms and university/law libraries, as well as many solo practitioners and non-professional users, have become and remained Kanunum subscribers.
In 2008-2009, and again in 2012, Kanunum became the recipient of TÜBİTAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) SME R&D grants primarily for its work in NLP. Our current research uses our existing LT technologies to catch legal citations and basic statutory and juridical intentions and track legislative changes and references in administrative and judicial decisions, and continues addressing the disambiguation problems in text search presented by the agglutinative Turkish language, further improving its search performance in Turkish.
Kanunum also views itself as a publisher of legal material in an online electronic environment and develops and utilizes its techniques in the language technologies and legal informatics areas to that end. It sees modern online legal research services as a continuation of print legal publishing, sharing its goals of presenting legal texts in an accurate, easy-to-understand and useful manner. These being the goals, it has come to define its primary opportunity and challenge in the electronic online environment as one of conversion: Kanunum aims to work with the unorganized and changing mass of legal electronic material--laws, rules, decisions, etc.--and use language and data processing technologies to convert it into an online service that produces--on demand and in response to user queries--user-friendly screens of correct, time-sensitive, and relevant legal texts and contexts.
Kanunum (Karakullukcu Consulting Inc) is a founding member of LT-Innovate. (http://www.lt-innovate.org/about/founders)
