Beyond the Experiment: The Extendable Legal Link Extractor
Marc van Opijnen, Nico Verwer, J.J.C. Meijer · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2015
In this paper we describe a software framework for detecting and resolving references to (national and EU) legislation, case law, parliamentary documents and official gazettes. Meant to function in a large-scale production environment, performance, flexibility and maintainability are essential requirements. This led us to some noteworthy choices: within the pipeline architecture of Apache Cocoon we use the trie data structure for named entity recognition and a parsing expression grammar for pattern recognition, the latter having significant advantages over the use of regular expressions. Additional attention is paid to some substantive maintainability issues.