How to Simplify Law Automatically? A Study on South Korean Legislation and Its Simplified Version

Stefanie Urchs, Akshaya Muralidharan, Florian Matthes

Abstract: People with a low literacy level have problems understanding complex texts. Especially legal texts can be challenging. Automatic Text Simplification (TS) can help to make the legal text more accessible. However, most TS research is based on Wikipedia articles and newspaper articles. To be able to use automatic TS on the legal text we have to understand what constitutes simple legal text. Therefore, we examine the English translation of South Korean legislation and its official simplification. Subsequently, we use state of the art TS models on the legislation text. The models simplify the text only quantitatively lacking in retaining the context of the original text.