Abstract

The automatic detection of definitions in legal texts has mainly been considered from the perspective of legal information retrieval so far. In this paper, we demonstrate that the same techniques can also be employed for the purpose of a domain-specific automated style checking of draft laws. We report on the automatic identification of legal definitions in a large corpus of Swiss laws, and we show that the information provided by the pattern-oriented detection mechanism we apply suffices to allow for an automatic evaluation of a range of stylistic rules concerning
the use of legal definitions in legislative texts.