Improving public access to legislation through legal citations detection: The Linkoln project at the Italian Senate

In this paper we describe Linkoln, an open framework for the automatic detection and linking of legal references contained in legal texts. The problem was tackled by providing a modular and extensible approach in order to efficiently cover the wide variability and specific peculiarities of legal citation practices. The project was initiated in collaboration with the Italian Senate with the aim to make available to Italian legislative authorities and official publishing bodies, a robust and extensible automatic tool to improve access to published legislation. The result of this effort is Linkoln which was recently successfully integrated in the application serving documents on the institutional website of the Italian Senate to activate hyperlinks to cited legislation.