Automated detection and resolution of legal cross references: Approach and a study of Luxembourg´s legislation

When elaborating compliance requirements, analysts need to follow the cross references in the underlying legal texts and consider the additional information in the cited provisions. To enable easier navigation and handling of cross references, automation is necessary for recognizing the natural language patterns used in cross reference expressions (cross reference detection), and for interpreting these expressions and linking them to the target provisions (cross reference resolution). In this paper, we propose a solution for automated detection and resolution of legal cross references. We ground our work on Luxembourg´s legislative texts, both for studying the natural language patterns in cross reference expressions and for evaluating the accuracy and scalability of our solution.