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Information extraction framework to build legislation network

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Abstract

This paper concerns an information extraction process for building a dynamic legislation network from legal documents. Unlike supervised learning approaches which require additional calculations, the idea here is to apply information extraction methodologies by identifying distinct expressions in legal text in order to extract network information. The study highlights the importance of data accuracy in network analysis and improves approximate string matching techniques to produce reliable network data-sets with more than 98% precision and recall. The applications and the complexity of the created dynamic legislation network are also discussed and challenged.

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Notes

  1. Shepard’s Citations include a judicial history of cases and statutes.

  2. For more details about MetaLex please refer to Boer et al. (2010).

  3. To estimate this error rate, a cluster sampling method is used to randomly choose ten sets of 30 entities. By manual check of the samples, the rate of incorrectly matched entities is observed.

  4. Time periods: before 1800, 1800–1850, 1850–1900, 1900–1950, 1950–2000, 2000–2018.

  5. To find the frequent words, Textalyzer Python module is used. The frequent prepositions, conjunctions and articles are excluded from the analysis.

  6. Based on their connectivity (total degree).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Neda Sakhaee & Mark C. Wilson

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  1. Neda Sakhaee
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  2. Mark C. Wilson
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Correspondence to Neda Sakhaee.

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Sakhaee, N., Wilson, M.C. Information extraction framework to build legislation network. Artif Intell Law 29, 35–58 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-020-09263-3

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