
Ask HN: What would you do with 1.3M laws? - a3camero
I&#x27;m the CTO of a law search engine that has 1.3 million laws from 47 countries. We&#x27;re now wondering what else to do with our giant database of laws. What kind of text analysis could you run? ML algorithms? Clustering? What would be interesting for you to see as an experiment?
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noir_lord
Depends how complete the corpus is, it would be interesting to compare
language across laws in different countries to see if how similar they are and
possibly detect the influence of lobbyists working on an international level.

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a3camero
We translate them into English using Microsoft/Google Translate (which is what
you need to do in order to compare between languages) so the meanings may not
be quite so easy to compare (because it relies on the current state of the art
of machine translation of language - still not at professional legal
translator level).

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stray
These laws often make reference to other laws, right? I'd like to see the
things referenced seamlessly merged in.

Also, it would be awesome if they could be presented in such a way that laymen
could understand what laws actually mean. Legal meanings of words are often
very different than the common meanings.

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a3camero
We've actually done some work about extracting definitions from laws. But the
meaning is still providing using legal language so they may not help too much
for the lay person.

