Identifying Draft Bills Impacting Existing Legislation: a Case Study on Romanian

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 3670–3674 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 3670 Identifying Draft Bills Impacting Existing Legislation: a Case Study on Romanian Corina Ceaus,u, Sergiu Nisioi Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest Academiei, 14, Bucharest corina.ceausu16@gmail.com, sergiu.nisioi@unibuc.ro Abstract In our paper, we aim to build the necessary resources to investigate the automatic categorization of draft bills that have the potential to impact previous Romanian legislation. For this purpose, we collect a historical corpus of laws related to public procurement legislation and a corpus of draft bills that have been idenitifed by legal experts as impacting existing policies on public procurement. Our results show that legal articles can be identified with as much as 82% accuracy using a BERT-based classifier and 73% with xgboost and a bag-of-words representation. Keywords: legal texts processing, Romanian corpora, text classification, text mining 1. Introduction Contemporary democracies implement elaborate pro- cesses to draft, revise, and approve legislative propos- als (bills) and several dozens of experts from different areas are employed to reason upon the impact of a new proposal (Fitsilis, 2021). Particularly, in Romania, ac- cording to the state Constitution, a new bill initiative may be proposed either by the Government, the Mem- bers of the Romanian Parliament, or citizens who have at least 10,000 signatures of popular support for the re- spective bill1. The Romanian Parliament is composed of the Chamber of Senate and the Chamber of Deputies where legal proposals are being debated, amended and voted upon. The legislating process may be more elaborate, how- ever, during the course of this paper we will assume the following steps: 1) a bill is first submitted to the Senate where it will be subjected to debate, amendments, and voting. If it passes the majority vote, 2) the bill will be sent to the Chamber of Deputies to go through the same process again. Finally, 3) if the bill passed the majority vote yet again, the Romanian President has the power to promulgate the bill or return it to the Parliament. Both parliament’s chambers have specialized commit- tees of experts covering the majority of public policy interests in a state, these range from finance, trans- portation, human rights, health, and industry to agri- culture, education, science, equality, and sports. To this date there are sixteen expert committees of the Senate and twenty five similar organizations at the Chamber of Deputies. Depending on the type of bill, several com- mittees might be called in for a written opinion on the proposal. For example, a bill that regulates the financ- ing of investments in tourism might require the advice from the Senate committees responsible for Industry, Finance, Public Administration, and Public Health. Af- 1http://www.cdep.ro/pls/dic/site.page? id=124 ter being approved by the Senate, it will be passed to the Chamber of Deputies where yet again several com- mittees will be asked for advice, e.g., The Committee for the Public Budget, for …

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