Bundesrecht: An Open Library and Corpus for German Statutory Reference Processing

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Darji, Harshil, Heckelmann, Martin, Kratsch, Christina, de Melo, Gerard
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866913173724987392
author Darji, Harshil
Heckelmann, Martin
Kratsch, Christina
de Melo, Gerard
author_facet Darji, Harshil
Heckelmann, Martin
Kratsch, Christina
de Melo, Gerard
contents Statutory references are central to legal language understanding, but are difficult to process automatically, as they appear in compact and variable surface forms, may combine multiple targets, use special abbreviations, and often point to lower-level units. Existing tools for German focus either on parsing references from legal documents or accessing statutory text once citations are explicit. This paper introduces bundesrecht, an open resource for German statutory reference processing, consisting of a software library and a structured corpus of German federal law. The library parses, normalizes, and resolves German statutory references, mapping raw citation strings to structured objects, expanding compact references into canonical forms, and linking them to statutory provisions. The accompanying dataset preserves the internal hierarchy of statutes from laws to fine-granular subclauses. We evaluate the parser and normalizer on 2,944 annotated German legal references using strict exact-match and micro information extraction metrics. We further evaluate canonical reference deduplication and show that normalized references group real citation surface variants far more reliably than string matching. bundesrecht is the first open resource that covers German statutory reference processing as an end-to-end pipeline, from raw citation string to resolved statutory provision, and is available on PyPI.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_31338
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bundesrecht: An Open Library and Corpus for German Statutory Reference Processing
Darji, Harshil
Heckelmann, Martin
Kratsch, Christina
de Melo, Gerard
Computation and Language
Statutory references are central to legal language understanding, but are difficult to process automatically, as they appear in compact and variable surface forms, may combine multiple targets, use special abbreviations, and often point to lower-level units. Existing tools for German focus either on parsing references from legal documents or accessing statutory text once citations are explicit. This paper introduces bundesrecht, an open resource for German statutory reference processing, consisting of a software library and a structured corpus of German federal law. The library parses, normalizes, and resolves German statutory references, mapping raw citation strings to structured objects, expanding compact references into canonical forms, and linking them to statutory provisions. The accompanying dataset preserves the internal hierarchy of statutes from laws to fine-granular subclauses. We evaluate the parser and normalizer on 2,944 annotated German legal references using strict exact-match and micro information extraction metrics. We further evaluate canonical reference deduplication and show that normalized references group real citation surface variants far more reliably than string matching. bundesrecht is the first open resource that covers German statutory reference processing as an end-to-end pipeline, from raw citation string to resolved statutory provision, and is available on PyPI.
title Bundesrecht: An Open Library and Corpus for German Statutory Reference Processing
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31338