A Support System for the Analysis and the Management of Complex Ruling Documents

This paper reports the experiment conducted for the development and assessment of a new software tool allowing the automatic discovery of correlations in large legislative frameworks. The system, named NavigaNorme, has been mainly designed to support experts of the Legal domain involved in the simplification of the Italian normative framework for all levels of the Public Administration. In fact, the most relevant functionality in NavigaNorme is the identification, given a paragraph in a selected norm, of those paragraphs (in the same norm and in other norms) that should be considered in trying to reduce the number of norms being in force or in drafting a new law. NavigaNorme relies on a search engine that combines classical Information retrieval techniques with some ad-hoc strategies introduced to increase the precision of the retrieval by exploiting implicit information extracted from the logical structure of Legal and normative texts. The effectiveness of NavigaNorme has been mainly measured in terms of precision, through an assessment procedure that involved experts of the Legal domain.