Research in Citation Context Analysis (CCA) has produced numerous taxonomic schemes that vary from three to 12+ categories, with different granularities and no mappings between frameworks, severely limiting systematic comparison and progress. Despite decades of study, CCA methods have largely relied on fragmented frameworks that treat citation tasks independently, ignoring systematic relationships between function classification, sentiment analysis, and importance assessment. To address these research gaps, we present three integrated contributions. First, we develop UniCite, a two-level taxonomy (six primary functions, 12 subcategories, two orthogonal dimensions) that systematically integrates three existing schemes. Second, we develop a comprehensive dataset of 4,017 citations combining established resources with 1,547 newly extracted citations from 2018-2024 publications, all manually annotated under our unified framework. Third, we demonstrate systematic task relationships through multi-task learning, achieving 21.1% relative improvement in subfunction classification over single-task approaches.

Common European Data Spaces (CEDS) are aimed at creating a single market for data across the EU that will power AI innovation. CEDS cover 14 sectors/domains and will allow secure, trustworthy data/AI models exchange between companies, public administrations etc. The Common European Language Data Space (LDS) is part of CEDS and is already made available in beta phase. The paper presents its technical design and implementation, its governance framework as well as use cases that demonstrate its value. LDS aspires to become part of the future European Language Technology ecosystem.

The legal domain is particularly challenging for natural language processing due to the personal and confidential information it contains. Despite the significant advances of large language models (LLMs), applying them to relation extraction (RE) in legal texts remains challenging, not only because of the task’s linguistic and semantic complexity, but also due to privacy, compliance, and infrastructure constraints under regulations such as the EU AI Act. To address these challenges, we propose a novel synthetic dataset for German legal relation extraction, created using LLMs through a controlled, privacy-preserving, template-based pipeline. The dataset allows for reproducible and legally compliant experimentation. We benchmark it using two few-shot learning paradigms, a description-enhanced Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) framework and Prototypical Networks with supervised contrastive loss and curriculum-aware prototype enrichment. Our results demonstrate that combining few-shot learning with structured semantic knowledge achieves robust and interpretable results, with the curriculum-aware Proto-Contrastive model reaching an F1-score of 99.83%.

The Common European Language Data Space (LDS) is an integral part of the EU data strategy, which aims at developing a single market for data. Its decentralised technical infrastructure and governance scheme are currently being developed by the LDS project, which also has dedicated tasks for proof-of-concept prototypes, handling legal aspects, raising awareness and promoting the LDS through events and social media channels. The LDS is part of a broader vision for establishing all necessary components to develop European large language models.

We describe a dataset developed for Named Entity Recognition in German federal court decisions. It consists of approx. 67,000 sentences with over 2 million tokens. The resource contains 54,000 manually annotated entities, mapped to 19 fine-grained semantic classes: person, judge, lawyer, country, city, street, landscape, organization, company, institution, court, brand, law, ordinance, European legal norm, regulation, contract, court decision, and legal literature. The legal documents were, furthermore, automatically annotated with more than 35,000 TimeML-based time expressions. The dataset, which is available under a CC-BY 4.0 license in the CoNNL-2002 format, was developed for training an NER service for German legal documents in the EU project Lynx.

We present a portfolio of natural legal language processing and document curation services currently under development in a collaborative European project. First, we give an overview of the project and the different use cases, while, in the main part of the article, we focus upon the 13 different processing services that are being deployed in different prototype applications using a flexible and scalable microservices architecture. Their orchestration is operationalised using a content and document curation workflow manager.