Automatic classification of provisions in legislative texts

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. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007.