Modern amendment drafting - The road to XML

Bert Willems

Software Architect
FontoXML

Abstract

This paper reports on an experiment to build a system which aids in the drafting of amendment documents. The system provides a mechanism to help validate the correctness of amendments. Furthermore, the system is able to semi-automatically sort the amendments in voting order and simulate the effects of amendments on the law. The proposed implementation is based on XML technology, an XML editor and machine learning.


Table of Contents

Context
Introduction
Validating amendments
Ordering amendments
Simulation
Problem definitions
Problem 1: Segment amendments in an amendments document
Problem 2: Recognize the location, action and operand information
Problem 3: Order the amendments according to the rule set
Problem 4: Generate the simulation
Implementation
Segmenting amendments (Problem #1)
Linear Chain Conditional Random Fields (CRF)
Model description
Recognizing location, action and operand information (Problem #2)
Validating amendments
Ordering the amendments (Problem #3)
Simulating the effect (Problem #4)
Human in the loop
Conclusions and further work
Bibliography