Collection and Annotation of the Romanian Legal Corpus

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 2773–2777 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 2773 Collection and Annotation of the Romanian Legal Corpus Dan Tufis,, Maria Mitrofan, Vasile P˘ais,, Radu Ion, Andrei Coman Research Institute for AI ”Mihai Dr˘ag˘anescu”, Romanian Academy ”Calea 13 Septembrie”, Bucharest 050711, Romania {tufis, maria, vasile, radu}@racai.ro Abstract We present the Romanian legislative corpus which is a valuable linguistic asset for the development of machine translation systems, especially for under-resourced languages. The knowledge that can be extracted from this resource is necessary for a deeper understanding of how law terminology is used and how it can be made more consistent. At this moment, the corpus contains more than 144k documents representing the legislative body of Romania. This corpus is processed and annotated at different levels: linguistically (tokenized, lemmatized and POS-tagged), dependency parsed, chunked, named entities identified and labeled with IATE terms and EUROVOC descriptors. Each annotated document has a CONLL-U Plus format consisting of 14 columns; in addition to the standard 10-column format, four other types of annotations were added. Moreover the repository will be periodically updated as new legislative texts are published. These will be automatically collected and transmitted to the processing and annotation pipeline. The access to the corpus is provided through ELRC infrastructure. Keywords: corpus, annotation, law, Romanian 1. Introduction In this paper we review the first results of the new project, ”Multilingual Resources for CEF.AT in the legal domain” (MARCELL) action1 whose final goal is to enable enhance- ment of the automatic translation in CEF.AT 2 on the body of national legislation in seven EU official languages. For this task, all the seven teams cooperated in order to pro- duce a comparable corpus aligned at the top-level domains identified by EUROVOC descriptors3. EUROVOC is a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union. It exists in the 24 official languages of the European Union. It is used by many major institutions in Europe which include: several governmental departments, regional and national parlia- ments in the continent, the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. It contains keywords orga- nized in 21 fields and 127 micro-thesauri and it serves as the basis for the domain names used in the European Union’s terminology database: Interactive Terminology for Europe (IATE) 4. IATE is the EU’s terminology database and it is used for dissemination and management of EU-specific ter- minology. One of its main aims is to facilitate the task of translators working for the EU. Currently, it has over 8 mil- lion terms and uses the EUROVOC thesaurus as a domain classification system. In the following we describe the activities and the results of the Romanian team. A general view of the project ac- tivities is given in another article (V´aradi et al., 2020). For the Romanian language, the current legal database created includes more than 144k legislative processed documents, issued starting from 1881. Since the last …

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