Welcome to nllegalcit’s documentation!

nllegalcit is a Python library to find citations to Dutch legal and parliamentary documents in natural language text.

This library is partially based on the linkextractor developed by KOOP to implement the Linked Data Overheid (LiDO). The aim of nllegalcit is to provide a more generally accessible way to recognize Dutch legal citations in natural language text.

Please note that this library is currently under development. It will probably not work reliably.

Installation

nllegalcit is currently built and tested for Python 3.10, using either the default CPython or the (much faster) PyPy runtime.

nllegalcit can be installed using pip:

$ pip install nllegalcit

Using nllegalcit

To find all supported citations in some string, we use the following general function:

nllegalcit.parse_citations(text: str) → list[Citation]

Parse any supported citation in a given text.

This gives us a list of all recognized citations in the input:

>>> from nllegalcit import parse_citations
>>> parse_citations("Kamerstukken I 1979/80, 15 516, nr. 42e, blz. 7")
[Kamerstukken I 1979-1980, 15516, nr. 42e p. 7]

Other specific parse functions also exist, for example to find citations in a PDF file, or to only find citations to Kamerstukken. For more information, please refer to the API reference.

Features

nllegalcit aims to provide a simple interface to find all supported citations in a text. At its core, nllegalcit consists of functions to parse a type of text (plaintext, PDF files, online PDF files, etc.), and specific Citation classes to describe the recognized citations.

Only absolute citations are recognized. Detecting relative citations in a text is currently out of scope for nllegalcit.

Supported citation types

The following types of citations are implemented:

  • Kamerstukken (Dutch parliamentary documents) [⚠️ Work in progress]:

    Works reasonably well for modern (>1995) citations following the guidelines. Older citations may work. Simple page number notations work.

  • Handelingen (Dutch parliamentary minutes) [⚠️ Work in progress]:

    Initial implementation exists, but needs more thorough testing.

  • ECLI case law [⚠️ Work in progress]:

    Seems to work, but more testing is needed. Paragraph information is not parsed.

The following types of citations are not yet implemented, but are planned:

  • Dutch case law other than ECLI

  • Dutch national laws

  • Dutch treaties

  • Dutch local laws

  • EU laws

Issues

Please file any issues you may have in GitHub.

Contents:

Indices and tables