metadata

license: cc-by-nc-4.0
language:
  - ru
tags:
  - legal
  - corpus
pretty_name: ' RusLawOD '
size_categories:
  - 100M<n<1B

The Russian Legislative Corpus, 1991–2023

Russian primary and secondary legislation corpus covering laws of Russian Federation, decrees by the President of RF, regulations by the government published as of December, 31, 2023. The corpus collects all 281,413 texts (176,523,268 tokens) of non-secret federal regulations and acts, along with their metadata. The corpus has two versions: the original text with minimal preprocessing and a version prepared for linguistic analysis with morphosyntactic markup.

For lemmatization, POS tagging, and dependency parsing we use the Ru-syntax tool developed by the Computational Linguistics team at the Higher School of Economics (Russia). This tool gathers the results from the morphological analyzer MyStem, part-of-speech tagging (Schmid, 2013) TreeTagger, and dependency grammar analyzer MaltParser. Finally, the result is stored in the CONLL-U format.

Structure

The corpus is stored in XML files each for one document. Every field appears if only the document has that kind of information. Fields descriptions are in the example below.

<act> <!-- Legal act as the type of a document -->
  <meta> <!-- major sections are metadata and text -->
    <identification> <!-- see the Limitations on information about legal act identification in Russia -->
      <pravogovruNd val="000000000" /> <!-- document internal number at the IPS Zakonodatelstvo 
      website at the moment of download. It may be subject to change -->
      <issuedByIPS val="Entity that issued the act according to the IPS Zakonodatelstvo" />
      <docdateIPS val="00.00.0000" /> <!-- document day of signature according to the IPS 
      Zakonodatelstvo, date format is dd.mm.yyyy-->
      <docNumberIPS val="000" /> <!-- document number at signature according to the IPS Zakonodatelstvo -->
      <headingIPS>title of the document in the IPS Zakonodatelstvo.</headingIPS> 
      <doc_typeIPS val="Document type as was in the source"/>
      <doc_author_normal_formIPS val="State organ that adopted the act, in normal language form"/>
      <signedIPS val="______"/> <!-- Person name who signed this legal act as provided in the source -->
      <statusIPS val="Утратил силу"/> <!-- In force, Not in force, In force with amendments: Acting status at the date of scrapping and as it was provided by the source -->
      <actual_datetimeIPS val="1710792705.7460072"/> <!-- Date and time when this data was scrapped from the original website -->
      <actual_datetime_humanIPS val="Mon Mar 18 23:11:45 2024"/> <!-- Date and time when this data was scrapped from the original website, in human readable format -->
      <is_widely_used val="1"/></identification> <!-- 1 if yes, 0 if no: is the document normative and in wide use (see article preprint for the details) -->
    </identification>
    <references>
      <classifierByIPS val="000.000.000.000.000" /> <!-- classification code according to the IPS Zakonodatelstvo -->
    </references>
    <keywords>
      <keywordByIPS val="KEYWORD" /> 
    </keywords>
  </meta>
  <body>
    <textIPS><-- Text parsed from the IPS Zakonodatelstvo --> 
    <!-- It can include hyperlinks to other acts, mostly amendments,
    like this: --> text <ref>linked text</ref> text 
    </textIPS>
    <taggedTextIPS> <-- CONLL_U morphosyntactic tagged text, cleaned -->
    </taggedTextIPS> 
  </body>
</act>
</act>

Metadata

Node	Attribute	Comment	N	Unique, n	Missing, %
body	textIPS	the text of a legal act	281413	–	0.9
	taggedtextips	Tagged text, CONLL-U	281413	–	0.9
meta	pravogovruNd	Internal ID, pravo.gov.ru	281413	281233	0
	issuedByIPS	Full name of a legal act (type + state body)	281413	2021	0
	doc_typeIPS	Type of legal act	281413	67	0
	doc_author_normal_formIPS	Unified state body name	281413	296	0.1
	docdateIPS	Date of official publication	281413	10606	0
	docNumberIPS	Document number at signature	281413	74927	0
	headingIPS	Title	281413	226734	0
	signedIPS	Official who signed an act	281413	1361	9. 8
	statusIPS	Status	281413	4	0
	actual_datetimeIPS	Dump date	281413	279994	0.4
	actual_datetime_humanIPS	Dump date	281413	115903	0.4
	is_widely_used	Flag for core acts	281413	2	0
keywords	keywordsByIPS	key words	281413	163766	18.9
reference	classifierByIPS	official classifier	281413	124978	19.2

Collection

We queried the online Legislation of Russia service (pravo.gov.ru) base called "IPS Zakonodatelstvo Rossii" maintained by the Special Communications Service for the texts legislation and their metadata. Our web scraping took place in the period spanning 2017—2024 with the last data collection taking part in April, 2024.

Usage

This dataset could be loaded in Python with HF's Datasets library:

from datasets import load_dataset
dataset = load_dataset(<path-to-parquet-files>)
dataset['train'][0]['textIPS']. # first chunk of main texts variable

For more information please see Datasets' documentation.

The dataset is published also at GitHub

Citation

If you use this corpus in your scientific work, please refer to: Saveliev, Denis, and Ruslan Kuchakov. "The Russian Legislative Corpus." arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.04855 (2024).

@ruslaw{saveliev2024russian,
  title={The Russian Legislative Corpus},
  author={Saveliev, Denis and Kuchakov, Ruslan},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.04855},
  year={2024}
}