Models of "Novelle" and Normative Grammar

In this paper we will present a method for mining information within legal texts, in particular in regards to corpora of statutes. Text mining, or more in general Information Extraction, can provide valuable help to people involved in research about the linguistic structure of statutes, and, as a side effect can be the seed for a new generation of applications for validation and conversion in the legislative domain. 1 Scope and assumptions For the communication of legislative sources through the Internet, the parliamentary and governmental institutions of many countries1 have begun a process of converting their “deposits” of these into a standard format for facilitating the retrieval and display of texts. The XML mark-up language seems to be the tool able to constitute the standard for the treatment and the web publication of the legislative information [1-2]. In order to adopt this language as a effective and really shared standard, two factors, in our opinion, must interact. A) Definition and promotion of a “controlled” legislative language At the cost of seeming superfluous and obvious, it is worth repeating that the promotion and dissemination of legistic standards2, and, therefore, of a strongly binding normative language can only facilitate the adhesion and use by bodies drafting norms to the technical standard proposed with the XML language. These drafting rules have been applied and complied with in the drafting of legislative instruments enacted by the State and Regions since the end of the 1980’s. After the 1980’s, these rules became increasingly wide-spread and put into application even if, on leafing through the legislative documents, it cannot be said that this application was always rigorous and uniform [4]. B) Use of tools for natural language recognition It is evident that the presence of common rules consolidate the definition of text models. It is also evident that this modelling assists in the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) means for the recognition of the structures of legislative instruments and their tagging according to the XLM standard. In fact, this tagging will be difficult to obtain from the law-maker as it is extraneous to the tasks and objectives involved in his normal activities. If other professionals do it later, it provoke (and in some cases it has already provoked) an often unsustainable increase in the time needed and the costs involved in building and managing the legislative knowledge base, structured according to XLM standards. 1See, for example: the data bank of legislative instruments of the Australian State of Tasmania at http://www.thelaw.tas.gov.au and the DTD relating to the parliamentary acts in the United States on the site http://xml.house.gov. 2Circular 20 April 2001, no. 10888 of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, “Regole e raccomandazioni per la formulazione tecnica dei testi legislativi”. For an in-depth illustration of the rules for legislative drafting in Italy and in Europe see [3]. 40 Models of "Novelle" and Normative Grammar