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15 A.I. & L. 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/artinl15 and id is 1 raw text is: Artificial Intelligence and Law (2007) 15:1-17                     © Springer 2007
DOI 10.1007/s10506-007-9038-0
Automatic Classification of Provisions in Legislative
Texts
E. FRANCESCONI' and A. PASSERINI2
1ITTIG - CNR, Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell'Informazione Giuridica - Consiglio Nazionale delle
Ricerche, Via Barucci 20, Florence, Italy
E-mail: francesconi@ ittig.cnr.it
2DSI - Dipartimento di Sistemi e Informatica, Universita di Firenze, Via S. Marta, 3, 50139,
Florence, Italy
E-mail: passerini@dsi.uni .it
Abstract. Legislation usually lacks a systematic organization which makes the management and
the access to norms a hard problem to face. A more analytic semantic unit of reference (provision)
for legislative texts was identified. A model of provisions (provisions types and their arguments)
allows to describe the semantics of rules in legislative texts. It can be used to develop advanced
semantic-based applications and services on legislation. In this paper an automatic bottom-up
strategy to qualify existing legislative texts in terms of provision types is described.
Key words: model of provisions, Naive Bayes classifier, SVM classifier, text categorization
1. Introduction
The lack of knowledge and control of the legal order, which the scarce
transparency of the legal system depends on, represents a crucial problem for
both the legislator and the citizens. Problems of different nature arised in
dealing with a non-systematic organization of legal order, from the uncer-
tainty of the impact of new laws in terms of coherency preservation, to the
difficulties in norm accessing by both citizens and legal experts.
In the '90 Biagioli (1991, 1997) identified a possible reason of these
problems in the fact that while a law is a normative and documentary unit of
reference, users and legal experts usually manage, access and refer to the legal
order in terms of the contained norms.
The inability to obtain an analytical/systematic vision of a legal order
necessarily creates obstacles to its knowledge and upkeep. Therefore a more
analytical unit of reference was identified in order to have a more organic
view of the legal system. According to this point of view a legislative text may

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