Constructing and exploiting an automatically annotated resource of legislative texts

AbstractIn this paper, we report on the construction of a resource of Swiss legislative texts that is automatically annotated with structural, morphosyntactic and content-related information, and we discuss the exploitation of this resource for the purposes of legislative drafting, legal linguistics and translation and for the evaluation of legislation. Our resource is based on the classified compilation of Swiss federal legislation. All texts contained in the classified compilation exist in German, French and Italian, some of them are also available in Romansh and English. Our resource is currently being exploited (a) as a testing environment for developing methods of automated style checking for legislative drafts, (b) as the basis of a statistical multilingual word concordance, and (c) for the empirical evaluation of legislation. The paper describes the domain- and language-specific procedures that we have implemented to provide the automatic annotations needed for these applications.