Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the ‘Evolution’ of Legal Language

Katz, Daniel; Bommarito, Michael James; Candeub, Adam; Agichtein, Eugene

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1971953

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…An n-gram language model predicts the probability of a given n-gram within any sequence of words in the language. It is widely used in text mining [15,16], including in the legal domain [19]. An n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text.…”

Section: Language Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Information Retrieval Pipeline for Legislative Documents from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

Souza

Vitório

Moriyama

et al. 2021

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications

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This work investigates information retrieval methods to address the existing difficulties on the Preliminary Search, part of the law making process from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. For such, different preprocessing approaches, stemmers, language models, and BM25 variants were compared. Two legislative corpora from Chamber were used to build and validate the pipeline. All texts were converted to lowercase and had stopwords, accentuation, and punctuation removed. Words were represented by their stem combined with word unigram and bigram language models. Retrieving the bill that was originated from a specific job request, the BM25L with Savoy stemmer reached a R@20 of 0.7356. After removing queries with inconsistencies or which made reference exclusively to attachments, to other job requests, or to bills, the R@20 increased to 0.94.

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Section: Language Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Information Retrieval Pipeline for Legislative Documents from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

Souza

Vitório

Moriyama

et al. 2021

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications

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show abstract

“…Recent research [12,15,35,43,44] has applied computer-based network analysis of courts' citation patterns. Corpus linguistic methods have also been used to add important detail to the otherwise broad picture of judicial practice that network analysis gives [29]. Within the cross-disciplinary field of Law and Language (legal linguistics) empirical studies of legal texts are widespread, but the corpora traditionally consist of small text collections that are analysed manually: see e.g.…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing Achievement in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

Potts

Kjær

2015

Int J Semiot Law

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The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN Security Council in 1993 to prosecute persons responsible for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars. As the first international war crimes tribunal since the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals set up after WWII, the ICTY has attracted immense interest among legal scholars since its inception, but has failed to garner the same level of attention from researchers in other disciplines, notably linguistics. This represents a significant research gap, as the Tribunal's public discourse (notably its case law and Annual Reports) can open up interesting avenues of analysis to researchers of law, language, and legal discourse alike. On its official website, the Tribunal claims that it has ''irreversibly changed the landscape of international humanitarian law'' and lists six specific achievements: ''Holding leaders accountable; bringing justice to victims; giving victims a voice; establishing the facts; developing international law and strengthening the rule of the law''. While a number of legal scholars have studied and critiqued the level of 'achievement' actually attained by the Tribunal against these metrics and others, of interest to linguists is the ways in which this work might be conveyed discursively. In this paper, we demonstrate how methods from the linguistic field of corpus-based critical discourse analysis can be utilised to explore the discursive construction of such achievements in the language of the ICTY.

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“…S . C ourt of A ppeals, using the L egal L anguage E xplorer (Katz et al., ). The counts are normalized to account for variation in docket size.…”

Section: Reed V Reed As a Jurisprudential Regimementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Legal Language Explorer ( http://legallanguageexplorer.com/) is an online tool that counts the number of times that a particular word or words appears within the corpus of USSC and U.S. Court of Appeals opinions in a given year, returning a time‐series plot (Katz, Bommarito, Seaman, Candeub, & Agichtein, ). Figure reports the normalized results, which control for the volume of cases on the docket in a given year.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture and Legal Policy Punctuation in the Supreme Court's Gender Discrimination Cases

Robinson¹

2014

Policy Studies Journal

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For the most part, punctuated equilibrium scholarship has ignored the legal policy change generated by the Supreme Court. In this study, I address this gap though an examination of the Court's equal protection and gender cases from the 1970s. My case study here has two aims. First, I offer an adaptation of the jurisprudential regimes framework as a device for framing and identifying legal policy punctuations. After identifying Reed v. Reed (1971) as the cut point of such a regime, I then use Reed and its progeny to illustrate the promise of culture in explaining stasis and change, specifically focusing on the concepts of cultural cognition and cultural surprise.

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Legal N-Grams? A Simple Approach to Track the ‘Evolution’ of Legal Language

Cited by 8 publications

References 12 publications

An Information Retrieval Pipeline for Legislative Documents from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

An Information Retrieval Pipeline for Legislative Documents from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

Constructing Achievement in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY): A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

Culture and Legal Policy Punctuation in the Supreme Court's Gender Discrimination Cases

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