Legal Markup Generation in the Large: An Experience Report

Nicolas Sannier, Morayo Adedjouma, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Lionel Briand, John Dann, Marc Hisette, Pascal Thill

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Legal markup (metadata) is an important prerequisite for the elaboration of legal requirements. Manually encoding legal texts into a markup representation is laborious, specially for large legal corpora amassed over decades and centuries. At the same time, automating the generation of markup in a fully accurate manner presents a challenge due to the flexibility of the natural-language content in legal texts and variations in how these texts are organized. Following an action research method, we successfully collaborated with the Government of Luxembourg in transitioning five major legislative codes from plain-text to a legal markup format. Our work focused on generating markup for the structural elements of the underlying codes. The technical basis for our work is an adaptation and enhancement of an academic markup generation tool developed in our prior research [1]. We reflect on the experience gained from applying automated markup generation at large scales. In particular, we elaborate the decisions we made in order to strike a cost-effective balance between automation and manual work for legal markup generation. We evaluate the quality of automatically-generated structural markup in real-world conditions and subject to the practical considerations of our collaborating partner.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2017
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages302-311
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781538631911
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 22 Sep 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event25th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2017 - Lisbon, Portugal
Duration: 4 Sep 20178 Sep 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2017

Conference

Conference25th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2017
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityLisbon
Period4/09/178/09/17

Keywords

  • Legal Markup
  • Legal Requirements
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)

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