Linking European Case Law: BO-ECLI Parser, an Open Framework for the Automatic Extraction of Legal Links

In this paper we present the BO-ECLI Parser, an open framework for the extraction of legal references from case-law issued by judicial authorities of European member States. The problem of automatic legal links extraction from texts is tackled for multiple languages and jurisdictions by providing a common stack which is customizable through pluggable extensions in order to cover the linguistic diversity and specific peculiarities of national legal citation practices. The aim is to increase the availability in the public domain of machine readable references meta-data for case-law by sharing common services, a guided methodology and efficient solutions to recurrent problems in legal references extraction, that reduce the effort needed by national data providers to develop their own extraction solution.