Pierluigi Spinosa

NLP-based metadata extraction for legal text consolidation

The paper describes a system for the automatic consolidation of Italian legislative texts to be used as a support of an editorial consolidating activity and dealing with the following typology of textual amendments: repeal, substitution and integration. The focus of the paper is on the semantic analysis of the textual amendment provisions and the formalized representation of the amendments in terms of meta-data. The proposed approach to consolidation is metadata--oriented and based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques: we use XML--based standards for metadata annotation of legislative acts and a flexible NLP architecture for extracting metadata from parsed texts. An evaluation of achieved results is also provided.

A legal drafting environment based on formal and semantic XML standards

The NIR project aims at making retrieval and navigation among normative documents in a distributed environment easier. To obtain this, XML and URN standards for normative documents have been established and the construction of tools working on these standards is promoted. Particularly, NIREditor, a specific drafting environment able to deal with new and legacy normative documents has been developed.

XML documents within a legal domain: Standards and tools for the Italian legislative environment

The Norme in rete (NIR) [Legislation on the Net] national project aims at making easier the retrieval and the navigation between legal documents in a distributed environment and to encourage the development of systems with characteristics of interoperability and effective of use. In order to obtain this, two standards have been defined: a URN standard, to identify these materials through uniform names, and XML-DTDs to describe legislative documents within the NIR domain. In this paper the definition of such standards and the developments of tools aimed at making easier their adoption are illustrated. Particularly this paper presents a specific law drafting environment, NIREditor, able to produce legal documents and to handle legacy legislative documents according to the NIR standards.