The ILDILAW project

Overview

The LISP corpus was created as a core component of the ILDILAW project (Implicit Linguistic Devices in Italian Law). This three-year research initiative, funded by the Italian Ministry of Educationa and hosted at the University of Genoa, investigates the "hidden" side of legal language to understand how implicit communication influences the Italian justice system.

Main Objectives:

The project aims to uncover the persuasive and potentially manipulative role of Implicit Linguistic Devices (I.L.D.)—such as presuppositions, implicatures, and vagueness—in lawyers' defense acts. Key goals include:

  • Analyzing Persuasion: Studying how lawyers use "non-bona fide" implicits to guide a judge’s interpretation without making explicit, challengeable claims;
  • Identifying Biases: detecting if implicit language is used to spread social or gender stereotypes, particularly in cases of family law and sexual violence;
  • Measuring Implicitness: Calculating a Global Implicitness Index to compare the "lawyer style" with other types of communication, such as political or media discourse.

Finally, the project has a practical goal: professional training. We want to help lawyers become more aware of their linguistic choices. By identifying these hidden strategies, we can create guidelines for more ethical, clear, and transparent legal writing.

Project Stages (2025–2028)

The research is organized into several key phases:

  • Phase 1 (late 2025-2026): Systematic manual coding of texts using the Inception platform, following a strict protocol to identify "Non-Bona Fide" strategies
    • Tagset;
    • Curation and consensus through negotiation;
    • Manual annotation and analysis of presuppositions in the corpus
    • Test with AI-assisted annotation;
  • Phase 2 & 3 (late 2026-2027): Systematic annotation of vagueness and implicatures;
  • Phase 4 (late 2027): Development of the project’s specialized search engine and calculation of the implicit index.
  • Phase 5 (2028): Comparison between global implicitness indexes and spread of fair-guidelines.

Snapshot

Host institution: University of Genoa (DIRAAS)     

CUP: D33C24002010001

Principal Investigator: Giulia Lombardi, PhD

Timeline:  36 months 2025/2028

Funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), Mission 4 “Education and Research” – Component 2 “From Research to Business”, Call No. 201 of 03/07/2024 – SOE20240000137.

Team

Dr. Giulia Lombardi is an Assistant Professor (RTD-A) in Italian Linguistics at the University of Genoa. Her research focuses on text linguistics, the teaching of Italian as a second language, and the pragmatics of legal discourse, with particular attention to implicit linguistic devices in legal pleadings and to the simplification of institutional language. She is a member of the Associazione per la Qualità degli Atti Amministrativi (AQuAA), where she is involved in research, training, and consultancy activities aimed at improving clarity and inclusiveness in institutional communication. In 2023, she published the volume Capire i documenti. Strategie didattiche e linguistiche per agevolare la comprensione dei testi istituzionali in lingua seconda (Cesati Editore). In 2024, she was awarded the Seal of Excellence for a proposal submitted under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship programme, which enabled her to secure funding for the ILDILAW project. For more information, see https://unige.iris.cineca.it/cris/rp/rp33519

Professor Dr. Daniele Fusi's work and research focus on digital humanities (DH) in digital texts. He is a professional full-stack software developer with decades of experience in specialized software solutions. He combines these skills with his knowledge of classical philology, primarily focusing on Greek and Latin language, philology, and metrics. 

Brandon Lombardi has been research fellow (SSD L-FIL-LET/12) awarded through public selection (D.D. n. 276/2023) for the PRIN project “Clearer Acts. VocAdv: the Lexicon of the Defence Advocate”, under the supervision of Prof. Maria Vittoria Dell’Anna. He has expertise in legal language, particularly in lawyers’ texts, as well as in text annotation methodologies. He is currently working as a research collaborator on the YoungResearcher – ILDILAWproject (Implicit Linguistic Devices in Italian Lawyers’ Proceedings), funded by the EU NextGenerationEU (PNRR), where he provides scientific support and focuses on the annotation of implicit linguistic devices in legal texts.