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Representing Standard Text Formulations as Directed Graphs

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Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021 Workshops (ICDAR 2021)

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Abstract

In order to ensure validity in legal texts like contracts and case law, lawyers rely on standardised formulations that are written carefully but also represent a kind of code with a meaning and function known to all legal experts. Using directed (acyclic) graphs to represent standardized text fragments, we are able to capture variations concerning time specifications, slight rephrasings, names, places and also OCR errors. We show how we can find such text fragments by sentence clustering, pattern detection and clustering patterns. To test the proposed methods, we use two corpora of German contracts and court decisions, specially compiled for this purpose. However, the entire process for representing standardised text fragments is language-agnostic. We analyze and compare both corpora and give an quantitative and qualitative analysis of the text fragments found and present a number of examples from both corpora.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The sources for the documents compiled for both corpora will be published on our website: http://textmining.wp.hs-hannover.de/juver.html. Likewise, we publish the developed methods and also the document collections on our project page.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hanover, Expo Plaza 12, 30539, Hanover, Germany

    Frieda Josi & Christian Wartena

  2. University of Hildesheim, Lübecker Straße 3, 31141, Hildesheim, Germany

    Ulrich Heid

Authors
  1. Frieda Josi
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  2. Christian Wartena
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  3. Ulrich Heid
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Frieda Josi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

    Elisa H. Barney Smith

  2. Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India

    Umapada Pal

A Appendices

A Appendices

1.1 A.1 Sources for Case Law Corpus

  1. 1.

    Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) – Decisions from criminal law: https://www.hrr-strafrecht.de/hrr/db/abfrage.php?type=erweitert&sortieren=relevanz&sortrichtung=ab&gericht=BGH&aktenzeichen=&datvon=&datbis=&volltext=&kurzbeschreibung=&norm=StGB&medium=-&verknuepfung=und&sz=2.

1.2 A.2 Sources for Contract Corpus

  1. 1.

    Stadtverwaltung Hansestadt Hamburg – City administration of Hamburg: http://suche.transparenz.hamburg.de/dataset?q=vertrag&esq_title=&check_all_

  2. 2.

    Stadtverwaltung Bremen – City administration of Bremen: https://www.transparenz.bremen.de, Keyword: Vertrag

  3. 3.

    Cooperation contracts between universities and also between universities and service providers: We searched specifically for contract files on university websites and added them to Contract corpus.

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Josi, F., Wartena, C., Heid, U. (2021). Representing Standard Text Formulations as Directed Graphs. In: Barney Smith, E.H., Pal, U. (eds) Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2021 Workshops. ICDAR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12917. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86159-9_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86159-9_34

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-86159-9

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