Descifrando Corpus Jurídicos: Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural para entender el Derecho

Enrique García-Tejeda

Authors

Enrique Garcia-Tejeda Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas

Keywords:

Readability, Legal Text, Text Mining, Text Classification, New Dale-Chall formula, Natural Language Processing

Abstract

The difficulty of reading and interpreting legal documents is common in many legal systems and jurisdictions. In common law, there are readability formulas to improve legal documents. However, formulas that use word dictionaries are limited to English, so they cannot be used directly in Spanish. The article adapts the New Dale-Chall formula to Spanish for the first time to apply it to 163 documents using a corpus from the Royal Spanish Academy, utilizing advances in statistical language models and natural language processing. The results go beyond an individual score. The formula makes it easier to analyze the most difficult legal rules to understand and comply with in legal bodies, and it also serves to compare plain language versions of court decisions for minorities. This advance identifies texts that are amenable to traditional legal analysis to assess their legal consequences, such as the imposition of high administrative costs on local businesses and residents, the existence of monopolistic barriers, and the improvement of judicial decisions aimed at people with disabilities and minors, among other uses.

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References

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