Legal Markup Generation in the Large: An Experience Report

Legal markup (metadata) is an important prerequisite for the elaboration of legal requirements. Manually encoding legal texts into a markup representation is laborious, specially for large legal corpora amassed over decades and centuries. At the same time, automating the generation of markup in a fully accurate manner presents a challenge due to the flexibility of the natural-language content in legal texts and variations in how these texts are organized. Following an action research method, we successfully collaborated with the Government of Luxembourg in transitioning five major legislative codes from plain-text to a legal markup format. Our work focused on generating markup for the structural elements of the underlying codes. The technical basis for our work is an adaptation and enhancement of an academic markup generation tool developed in our prior research [1]. We reflect on the experience gained from applying automated markup generation at large scales. In particular, we elaborate the decisions we made in order to strike a cost-effective balance between automation and manual work for legal markup generation. We evaluate the quality of automatically-generated structural markup in real-world conditions and subject to the practical considerations of our collaborating partner.