An analysis of topic modelling for legislative texts

Abstract

The uprise of legislative documents within the past decade has risen dramatically, making it difficult for law practitioners to attend to legislation such as Statutory Instrument orders and Acts. This work focuses on the use of topic models for summarizing and visualizing British legislation, with a view toward easier browsing and identification of salient legal topics and their respective set of topic specific terms. We provide an initial qualitative evaluation from a legal expert on how the models have performed by ranking them for each jurisdiction according to topic coherency and relevance