Differentiation and Empirical Analysis of Reference Types in Legal Documents

This paper proposes an extensible model distinguishing between reference types within legal documents. It differentiates between four types of references, namely fully-explicit, semi-explicit, implicit, and tacit references. We conducted a case study on German laws to evaluate both: the model and the proposed differentiation of reference types. We adapted text mining algorithms to determine and classify the different references according to their type. The evaluation shows that the consideration of additional reference types heavily impacts the resulting network structure by inducing a plethora of new edges and relationships. This work extends the approaches made in network analysis and argues for the necessity of detailed differentiation between references throughout legal documents.