This thesis describes linguistic interpretation in the context of interpretation of law, that is defined either as discipline of law, either as social discipline. In linguistic interpretation plays basic role linguistic interpretation. In the chapter that follows the chapter with description of the linguistic interpretation and its specifics in interpretation of law, the author puts linguistic interpretation among the other methods of interpretation. Although she admits the opinion of The Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic, that linguistic interpretation is only the first approach to the text, she looks for argumentation that disproves this opinion. She finds one of possible arguments, when she relativizes enumeration of linguistics disciplines, because of pragmatics. Pragmatics as a linguistic discipline is not in this enumeration. The author says, that the reason is, that pragmatics would change meaning and understanding of the linguistic interpretation, bescause of presence of context as a common factor in pragmatics and in the teleological interpretation. The fourth chapter describes legal language as an object of the linguistic interpretation and also as an instrument of lawmakers. Author finds a reason for necessity of the linguistic interpretation in the fact, that lawmakers don't...

This thesis describes the implementation of a covering algorithm for semantic decomposition of sentences of technical patents. This research complements the ASPIN project that has a long term goal of providing an automated system for digital system synthesis from patents. In order to develop a prototype of the system explained in a patent, a natural language processor (sentence-interpreter) is required. These systems typically attempt to interpret a sentence by syntactic analysis (parsing) followed by semantic analysis. Quite often, the technical narrative contains grammatical errors, incomplete sentences, anaphoric references and typological errors that can cause the grammatical parse to fail. In such situations, an alternate method that uses a repository of pre-compiled, simple sentences (called frames) to analyze the sentences of the patent can be a useful back up. By semantically decomposing the sentences of patents to a set of frames whose meanings are fully understood, the meaning of the patent sentences can be interpreted. This thesis deals with the semantic decomposition of sentences using a branch and bound covering algorithm. The algorithm is implemented in C++. A number of experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of this algorithm. The covering algorithm uses a standard branch and bound algorithm to semantically decompose sentences. The algorithm is fast, flexible and can provide good (100 % coverage for some sentences) coverage results. The system covered 67.68 % of the sentence tokens using 3459 frames in the repository. 54.25% of the frames identified by the system in covers for sentences, were found to be semantically correct. The experiments suggest that the performance of the system can be improved by increasing the number of frames in the repository. / Master of Science