LexDrafter: Terminology Drafting for Legislative Documents using
  Retrieval Augmented Generation
Ashish Chouhan Michael Gertz
With the increase in legislative documents at the EU, the number of new terms
and their definitions is increasing as well. As per the Joint Practical Guide
of the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission, terms used in legal
documents shall be consistent, and identical concepts shall be expressed
without departing from their meaning in ordinary, legal, or technical language.
Thus, while drafting a new legislative document, having a framework that
provides insights about existing definitions and helps define new terms based
on a document's context will support such harmonized legal definitions across
different regulations and thus avoid ambiguities. In this paper, we present
LexDrafter, a framework that assists in drafting Definitions articles for
legislative documents using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and existing
term definitions present in different legislative documents. For this,
definition elements are built by extracting definitions from existing
documents. Using definition elements and RAG, a Definitions article can be
suggested on demand for a legislative document that is being drafted. We
demonstrate and evaluate the functionality of LexDrafter using a collection of
EU documents from the energy domain. The code for LexDrafter framework is
available at https://github.com/achouhan93/LexDrafter.