An important thrust of e-Government is increasing citizens’ access to legal texts such as laws and regulations through online portals. While formats such as HTML and PDF have traditionally been the norm for these portals, there has been a rapid shift in recent years toward markup representations that provide legal information alongside the texts.
With the release in 2017 of the digital legal portal legilux.lu (http://www. legilux.public.lu), Luxembourg went a further step to provide an official and in-force electronic version of the texts, the paper version not having legal value anymore.
During the digitization effort, the need was raised to convert large amounts of consolidated “Codes”, available online only as PDF documents. An immediate challenge in this respect was, given the sheer scale of the legal corpora that need to be enhanced with metadata, a fully manual process would be extremely laborious and prohibitively expensive. This called for techniques that can provide automated assistance in identifying and annotating the metadata items.
In the past two years, SCL – the government agency in charge of legilux.lu – and the SnT Centre at the University of Luxembourg have been engaged in a collaborative project aimed at automating the extraction of metadata from legal texts. The metadata items currently covered concern the hierarchical organization of legal texts and their cross references.
As part of the above joint initiative, an automated assistance tool, named ARMLET (Automated Retrieval of Metadata from Legal Texts) has been developed in order to automate the conversion of legal acts. In particular, ARMLET leverages artificial intelligence technologies, particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP), for automated demarcation of legal metadata and converting legal texts into a structured XML documents. It has been successfully applied for converting seven of Luxembourg’s legislative codes into digital resources, most of which have been published on legilux.lu or are under review.
In our presentation, we will be describing ARMLET alongside our preliminary experience applying it to legal texts in Luxembourg,
Related Session:
October 12th, 2018
Session V.B. Interoperability, Standard and Rules
11:45-13:30
Sala Strozzi of Natural History Museum of the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Florence