Legal information retrieval and application to e-rulemaking

The complexity and diversity of government regulations make understanding the regulations a non-trivial task. One of the issues is the existence of multiple sources of regulations and interpretive guides; the latter are often independent of governing bodies. This work aims to develop an information infrastructure for legal information retrieval with applications to electronic-rulemaking. The pilot study focuses on accessibility regulations from the US Federal government, private organizations and European agencies. A shallow parser is developed to consolidate different regulations into a unified XML format, which is well suited for handling semi-structured data such as legal documents. Handcrafted rules and a text mining tool are developed to extract the important features, such as concepts, measurements, effective dates and so on, and to incorporate them into the corpus.To compare and locate related provisions from different regulatory documents, we employ Information Retrieval techniques to combine generic features with domain knowledge. Structural information from regulations, such as the hierarchical organization of provisions and heavy referencing among provisions, are used to help improve the relatedness analysis. Results are obtained to illustrate the use of regulatory structure and domain knowledge in provision comparisons. Application to an e-rulemaking scenario for a rights-of-way drafted regulation is shown to demonstrate extended capabilities of the prototype system.

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