Legal entity recognition in an agglutinating language and document connection network for EU Legislation and EU/Hungarian Case Law

TL;DR

This paper presents Justeus, a federated search application for EU and Hungarian legal documents, featuring advanced document connection networks and visualization tools to aid legal research and analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive legal document database with real-time network visualization of document relationships, enhancing legal research capabilities in EU and Hungarian law.

Findings

Contains over 1 million documents with daily updates

Provides real-time visualization of document citation networks

Enables identification of influential legal documents

Abstract

We have developed an application aiming at federated search for EU and Hungarian legislation and jurisdiction. It now contains above 1 million documents, with daily updates. The database holds documents downloaded from the EU sources EUR-Lex and Curia Online as well as public jurisdiction documents from the Constitutional Court of Hungary and The National Office for The Judiciary. The application is termed Justeus. Justeus provides comprehensible search possibilities. Besides free text and metadata (dropdown list) searches, it features hierarchical data structures (concept hierarchy trees) of directory codes and classification as well as subject terms. Justeus collects all links of a particular document to other documents (court judgements citing other case law documents as well as legislation, national court decisions referring to EU regulation etc.) as tables and directed graph networks. Choosing a document, its relations to other documents are visualized in real time as a network. Network graphs help in identifying key documents influencing or referred by many other documents (legislative and/or jurisdictive) and sets of documents predominantly referring to each other (citation networks).