Exploiting Textual Similarity Techniques in Harmonization of Laws

This paper describes an application of textual similarity techniques in the Legal Informatics domain. In European law, a relevant interest relates to the transposition of EU directives by the Member States, which can be complete, partial, or eventually absent. As part of an European project, legal experts annotated transpositions of six directives on a per-article basis. Following an established NLP pipeline, we explore a similarity-based technique to identify correspondences between transpositions of national implementations. Early results are promising and show the role that Artificial Intelligence may play within the process of harmonization and standardization of domestic legal systems as a result of the adoption of EU legislation.