A next step towards automated modelling of sources of law

The ultimate goal of the research line described here is support for automated modelling of sources of law. One of the first steps is the automatic recognition of norms. In earlier work we presented a categorization of norms or provisions in legislation.
We claimed that the categories are characterized by the use of typical sentence structures and that this would enable automatic detection and classification. In this paper we present the results of experiments in such automatic classification of provisions. We have defined fourteen different categories of provisions, and compiled a list of 88 sentence structures for those categories from twenty Dutch laws. Based on these structures, a parser was used to classify the sentences in fifteen different Dutch laws, classifying 91% of 592 sentences correctly. It compares well with other, statistical approaches. An important improvement of our classifier will be the distinction of principal and auxiliary
sentences.