Automating the Analysis of Institutional Design in International Agreements
This work addresses the challenge of analyzing complex institutional structures in legal documents for researchers in political science or international law, but it is incremental as it applies existing NLP and graph methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically extracting formal institutional design elements like norms, rules, and actors from international agreements, resulting in a tool that analyzes actor visibility and centrality in regulating cultural heritage relations, as tested on the 2003 UNESCO Convention.
This paper explores the automatic knowledge extraction of formal institutional design - norms, rules, and actors - from international agreements. The focus was to analyze the relationship between the visibility and centrality of actors in the formal institutional design in regulating critical aspects of cultural heritage relations. The developed tool utilizes techniques such as collecting legal documents, annotating them with Institutional Grammar, and using graph analysis to explore the formal institutional design. The system was tested against the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.