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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