Das Verfahren vor dem Berner Kindes- und Erwachsenenschutzgericht

In the canton of Bern, the Child and Adult Protection Court performs the tasks of the judicial complaints authority in child and adult protection matters. It forms part of the civil department of the higher court and is made up of senior judges as well as specialist judges. The proceedings before this specialized court are characterized by a pluralism of legal sources: a federal rump order in the Swiss Civil Code is given concrete form by a cantonal special procedural code, which in turn refers to the general administrative process of the canton of Bern. The present work systematically presents the proceedings before the child and adult protection court and is intended to serve as an orientation for those seeking justice, lawyers and members of the court on procedural issues

School-Related and Individual Predictors of Subjective Well-Being and Academic Achievement

Recent research in the educational context has focused not only on academic achievement but also on subjective well-being (SWB) as both play a major role in students’ lives. Whereas the determinants of academic achievement have been extensively investigated, little research has been conducted on school-related determinants of SWB in comparison with other students’ characteristics. In the present cross-sectional study, we set out to investigate whether perceived school climate predicts school grades and SWB above and beyond other variables that are important for SWB and academic achievement. A sample of 767 8th and 9th grade students (n = 361 female adolescents; age: M = 14.07 years, SD = 0.92) completed measures of SWB, perceived school climate, test anxiety, self-efficacy, and interest. Grade point average (GPA) indicated students’ academic achievement. Data were analyzed with latent structural equation models in which GPA and SWB were regressed on the school climate variables and students’ characteristics. Results indicated that a positive school climate as well as self-efficacy and the worry component of test anxiety predicted SWB and/or GPA after all other variables were controlled for. Directions for future research and the importance of school climate variables on adolescents’ SWB and academic achievement are discussed

Europe Facing Geoeconomics : Assessing Finland’s and the EU’s Risks and Options in the Technological Rivalry

The geoeconomic rivalry is accelerating with the world’s major powers using economic instruments to advance strategic agendas. This poses a challenge to the EU and its member states. The EU’s market-oriented approach to international economic engagement exposes it to risks arising from the geoeconomic power politics of other major powers. These risks are especially acute in the technological domain where Europe’s competitiveness has been decreasing and its strategic dependencies on China and the United States growing. This report examines the risks and options for the EU and one of its member states – Finland – in adapting to the rise of geoeconomics. The report shows how the risk picture for European businesses are undergoing change, highlighting the need to incorporate geoeconomic dynamics into existing risk assessments. It also surveys emerging EU and Finnish policy instruments for managing strategic interdependencies and associated risks. The report gathers in-depth data on European and Finnish interdependencies with China and the United States, taking stock of critical strengths and vulnerabilities. Key policy recommendations following from this analysis focus on 1) introducing national geoeconomic risk assessments; 2) increasing strategic coordination of technological governance; 3) promoting trade cooperation; and 4) ensuring a level playing field for European companies.This publication is part of the implementation of the Government Plan for Analysis, Assessment and Research. (tietokayttoon.fi) The content is the responsibility of the producers of the information and does not necessarily represent the view of the Government

Structural Analysis of Contract Renewals

In the present paper we sketch an automated procedure to compare different versions of a contract. The contract texts used for this purpose are structurally differently composed PDF files that are converted into structured XML files by identifying and classifying text boxes. A classifier trained on manually annotated contracts achieves an accuracy of 87% on this task. We align contract versions and classify aligned text fragments into different similarity classes that enhance the manual comparison of changes in document versions. The main challenges are to deal with OCR errors and different layout of identical or similar texts. We demonstrate the procedure using some freely available contracts from the City of Hamburg written in German. The methods, however, are language agnostic and can be applied to other contracts as well

Das Verfahren vor dem Berner Kindes- und Erwachsenenschutzgericht

In the canton of Bern, the Child and Adult Protection Court performs the tasks of the judicial complaints authority in child and adult protection matters. It forms part of the civil department of the higher court and is made up of senior judges as well as specialist judges. The proceedings before this specialized court are characterized by a pluralism of legal sources: a federal rump order in the Swiss Civil Code is given concrete form by a cantonal special procedural code, which in turn refers to the general administrative process of the canton of Bern. The present work systematically presents the proceedings before the child and adult protection court and is intended to serve as an orientation for those seeking justice, lawyers and members of the court on procedural issues.Im Kanton Bern nimmt das Kindes- und Erwachsenenschutzgericht die Aufgaben der gerichtlichen Beschwerdeinstanz in Kindes- und Erwachsenenschutzsachen wahr. Es bildet einen Teil der Zivilabteilung des Obergerichts und ist mit Oberrichterinnen und Oberrichtern wie auch mit Fachrichterinnen und Fachrichtern besetzt. Das Verfahren vor diesem Fachgericht ist geprägt von einem Rechtsquellenpluralismus: Eine bundesrechtliche Rumpfordnung im Schweizerischen Zivilgesetzbuch wird konkretisiert durch eine kantonale Spezialverfahrensordnung, die wiederum lückenfüllend auf den allgemeinen Verwaltungsprozess des Kantons Bern verweist. Das vorliegende Werk stellt das Verfahren vor dem Kindes- und Erwachsenenschutzgericht systematisch dar und soll sowohl den Rechtssuchenden, den Rechtsanwältinnen und Rechtsanwälten als auch den Mitgliedern des Gerichts bei prozessualen Fragen als Orientierung dienen

Preparing Legal Documents for NLP Analysis: Improving the Classification of Text Elements by Using Page Features

Legal documents often have a complex layout with many different headings, headers and footers, side notes, etc. For the further processing, it is important to extract these individual components correctly from a legally binding document, for example a signed PDF. A common approach to do so is to classify each (text) region of a page using its geometric and textual features. This approach works well, when the training and test data have a similar structure and when the documents of a collection to be analyzed have a rather uniform layout. We show that the use of global page properties can improve the accuracy of text element classification: we first classify each page into one of three layout types. After that, we can train a classifier for each of the three page types and thereby improve the accuracy on a manually annotated collection of 70 legal documents consisting of 20,938 text elements. When we split by page type, we achieve an improvement from 0.95 to 0.98 for single-column pages with left marginalia and from 0.95 to 0.96 for double-column pages. We developed our own feature-based method for page layout detection, which we benchmark against a standard implementation of a CNN image classifier. The approach presented here is based on corpus of freely available German contracts and general terms and conditions. Both the corpus and all manual annotations are made freely available. The method is language agnostic

Detecting Paraphrases of Standard Clause Titles in Insurance Contracts

For the analysis of contract texts, validated model texts, such as model clauses, can be used to identify used contract clauses. This paper investigates how the similarity between titles of model clauses and headings extracted from contracts can be computed, and which similarity measure is most suitable for this. For the calculation of the similarities between title pairs we tested various variants of string similarity and token based similarity. We also compare two additional semantic similarity measures based on word embeddings using pre-trained embeddings and word embeddings trained on contract texts. The identification of the model clause title can be used as a starting point for the mapping of clauses found in contracts to verified clauses

Generalisierung von formelhaften Textbestandteilen in juristischen Korpora: Einsatz- und Entwicklungspotential

Generalisierte Rechtsdokumente, bei denen für die individuellen Ausprägungen eines Vertrages die Positionen im Text bekannt sind, können eingesetzt werden, um erstens das Genehmigungsverfahren von Neuverträgen automatisiert zu unterstützen und zweitens als Vertragsgenerator neue Rechtsdokumente vorausgewählt zur Verfügung zu stellen. In diesem Beitrag wird, mithilfe von bekannten juristischen Texten gezeigt, wie formelhafte Textabschnitte identifiziert und häufige individuelle Ausprägungen klassifiziert werden können, um als Musterabschnitte eingesetzt zu werden. Es werden Einsatzbereiche vorgestellt und vorhandenes Potential für Legal Tech-Anwendungen aufgezeigt

Representing Standard Text Formulations as Directed Graphs

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

School-related and individual predictors of subjective well-being and academic achievement

Recent research in the educational context has focused not only on academic achievement but also on subjective well-being (SWB) as both play a major role in students’ lives. Whereas the determinants of academic achievement have been extensively investigated, little research has been conducted on school-related determinants of SWB in comparison with other students’ characteristics. In the present cross-sectional study, we set out to investigate whether perceived school climate predicts school grades and SWB above and beyond other variables that are important for SWB and academic achievement. A sample of 767 8th and 9th grade students (n = 361 female adolescents; age: M = 14.07 years, SD = 0.92) completed measures of SWB, perceived school climate, test anxiety, self-efficacy, and interest. Grade point average (GPA) indicated students’ academic achievement. Data were analyzed with latent structural equation models in which GPA and SWB were regressed on the school climate variables and students’ characteristics. Results indicated that a positive school climate as well as self-efficacy and the worry component of test anxiety predicted SWB and/or GPA after all other variables were controlled for. Directions for future research and the importance of school climate variables on adolescents’ SWB and academic achievement are discussed