Automatic mark-up of legislative documents and its application to parallel text generation

In the juridical domain a huge amount of plain legislative acts have been produced since and before the advent of computers and word processors. The conversion of legacy and plain documents in a standard XML format implies great and numerous benefits. In order to accomplish this task, several automatic and semi-automatic tools have been developed in the last ten years. In this paper, xmLegesMarker, developed at Ittig, the Italian state-of-art legislative documents parser, is presented. The tool is NIR standard compliant, it’s embedded in xmLegesEditor and it was recently adopted for evaluation by the Italian Senate in order to automatically spawn the parallel text (testo a fronte), i.e. the document used to highlight the modifications introduced during the debate of a bill.