ManyLaws - EU-wide Legal Text Mining using Big Data Processing Infrastructures

Budget: Estimated 1,952,964 € - Max EU Contribution (75%): 1,464,723 €

Financing program: Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) – Telecommunications sector

Call: 2017-EU-IA-0179

Funding body: European Commission

Project partners:   1. University of the Aegean - Research Unit (Coordinator)

                               2. Hellenic Parliament - European Programs Implementation Service

                               3. Austrian Parliamentary Administration - Parlamentsdirektion

                               4. Danube University Krems-University for Continuing Education/Donau - Universität Krems - Universität für Weiterbildung

                               5. ΙNTRASOFT International S.A.

Duration: 24 months

Summary

The Action will set-up a platform (ManyLaws) which will deliver a set of services, to the Parliaments, public bodies and organizations, citizens and businesses built on text mining, advanced processing and semantic analysis technologies, of the EU, Greek and Austrian laws.

Purpose

The Action's overall objective is to enable access to legal information across the European Union and improve the efficacy of decision making in legislative procedures operated by public bodies.

Results

The project provides for the creation of the following services:

 1. Research of national legal bodies (legal corpora) in Greek, English and German language.

 2. Examining the alignment of Greek and Austrian legislation with EU legislation, eg whether or not to transpose EU directives into national law.

 3. Comparison of the national laws of Greece and Austria with the aim of the same "life events".

 4. Search in parallel Greek and Austrian legal frameworks using simple keywords (through parallel translation of search terms).

 5. Analysis of references to European legislation by national laws and within the same Member State.

 6. Comparative analysis of equivalent or relevant laws in same EU Member State.

 7. Analysis of the time structure of the legal acts, reflection of the progress and current status of a specific national or European legislation (after amendment/extensions) over time, including preparatory acts and agreements.

 8. Visualizations of correlations, dependencies, and conflicts between different laws, including geographical and textual representations.

 9. Decision support service for legal procedures.

10. Interrelation of laws with social media news, including sentiment analysis technologies.

These services will be evaluated as to the improvement of decision-making effectiveness in the legislative and parliamentary process both in the Greek and Austrian Parliaments involved in the project. At the same time, it will help the users to follow the procedures that led to the adoption of an existing legal act and the public bodies to identify how it affects and is influenced or contradicts the formulation of a future policy.