--- annotations_creators: - found language_creators: - found language: - bg - cs - da - de - el - en - es - et - fi - fr - hr - hu - it - lt - lv - mt - nl - pl - pt - ro - sk - sl - sv license: - cc-by-sa-4.0 multilinguality: - multilingual size_categories: - 10K Language ISO code Member Countries where official EU Speakers [1] Number of Documents [2] English en United Kingdom (1973-2020), Ireland (1973), Malta (2004) 13/ 51% 55,000 / 5,000 / 5,000 German de Germany (1958), Belgium (1958), Luxembourg (1958) 16/32% 55,000 / 5,000 / 5,000 French fr France (1958), Belgium(1958), Luxembourg (1958) 12/26% 55,000 / 5,000 / 5,000 Italian it Italy (1958) 13/16% 55,000 / 5,000 / 5,000 Spanish es Spain (1986) 8/15% 52,785 / 5,000 / 5,000 Polish pl Poland (2004) 8/9% 23,197 / 5,000 / 5,000 Romanian ro Romania (2007) 5/5% 15,921 / 5,000 / 5,000 Dutch nl Netherlands (1958), Belgium (1958) 4/5% 55,000 / 5,000 / 5,000 Greek el Greece (1981), Cyprus (2008) 3/4% 55,000 / 5,000 / 5,000 Hungarian hu Hungary (2004) 3/3% 22,664 / 5,000 / 5,000 Portuguese pt Portugal (1986) 2/3% 23,188 / 5,000 / 5,000 Czech cs Czech Republic (2004) 2/3% 23,187 / 5,000 / 5,000 Swedish sv Sweden (1995) 2/3% 42,490 / 5,000 / 5,000 Bulgarian bg Bulgaria (2007) 2/2% 15,986 / 5,000 / 5,000 Danish da Denmark (1973) 1/1% 55,000 / 5,000 / 5,000 Finnish fi Finland (1995) 1/1% 42,497 / 5,000 / 5,000 Slovak sk Slovakia (2004) 1/1% 15,986 / 5,000 / 5,000 Lithuanian lt Lithuania (2004) 1/1% 23,188 / 5,000 / 5,000 Croatian hr Croatia (2013) 1/1% 7,944 / 2,500 / 5,000 Slovene sl Slovenia (2004) <1/<1% 23,184 / 5,000 / 5,000 Estonian et Estonia (2004) <1/<1% 23,126 / 5,000 / 5,000 Latvian lv Latvia (2004) <1/<1% 23,188 / 5,000 / 5,000 Maltese mt Malta (2004) <1/<1% 17,521 / 5,000 / 5,000 [1] Native and Total EU speakers percentage (%) \ [2] Training / Development / Test Splits ## Dataset Creation ### Curation Rationale The dataset was curated by Chalkidis et al. (2021).\ The documents have been annotated by the Publications Office of EU (https://publications.europa.eu/en). ### Source Data #### Initial Data Collection and Normalization The original data are available at the EUR-LEX portal (https://eur-lex.europa.eu) in unprocessed formats (HTML, XML, RDF). The documents were downloaded from the EUR-LEX portal in HTML. The relevant EUROVOC concepts were downloaded from the SPARQL endpoint of the Publications Office of EU (http://publications.europa.eu/webapi/rdf/sparql). We stripped HTML mark-up to provide the documents in plain text format. We inferred the labels for EUROVOC levels 1--3, by backtracking the EUROVOC hierarchy branches, from the originally assigned labels to their ancestors in levels 1--3, respectively. #### Who are the source language producers? The EU has 24 official languages. When new members join the EU, the set of official languages usually expands, except the languages are already included. MultiEURLEX covers 23 languages from seven language families (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Uralic, Baltic, Semitic, Hellenic). EU laws are published in all official languages, except Irish, for resource-related reasons (Read more at https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-languages_en). This wide coverage makes MultiEURLEX a valuable testbed for cross-lingual transfer. All languages use the Latin script, except for Bulgarian (Cyrillic script) and Greek. Several other languages are also spoken in EU countries. The EU is home to over 60 additional indigenous regional or minority languages, e.g., Basque, Catalan, Frisian, Saami, and Yiddish, among others, spoken by approx. 40 million people, but these additional languages are not considered official (in terms of EU), and EU laws are not translated to them. ### Annotations #### Annotation process All the documents of the dataset have been annotated by the Publications Office of EU (https://publications.europa.eu/en) with multiple concepts from EUROVOC (http://eurovoc.europa.eu/). EUROVOC has eight levels of concepts. Each document is assigned one or more concepts (labels). If a document is assigned a concept, the ancestors and descendants of that concept are typically not assigned to the same document. The documents were originally annotated with concepts from levels 3 to 8. We augmented the annotation with three alternative sets of labels per document, replacing each assigned concept by its ancestor from level 1, 2, or 3, respectively. Thus, we provide four sets of gold labels per document, one for each of the first three levels of the hierarchy, plus the original sparse label assignment.Levels 4 to 8 cannot be used independently, as many documents have gold concepts from the third level; thus many documents will be mislabeled, if we discard level 3. #### Who are the annotators? Publications Office of EU (https://publications.europa.eu/en) ### Personal and Sensitive Information The dataset contains publicly available EU laws that do not include personal or sensitive information with the exception of trivial information presented by consent, e.g., the names of the current presidents of the European Parliament and European Council, and other administration bodies. ## Considerations for Using the Data ### Social Impact of Dataset [More Information Needed] ### Discussion of Biases [More Information Needed] ### Other Known Limitations MultiEURLEX covers 23 languages from seven language families (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Uralic, Baltic, Semitic, Hellenic). This does not imply that no other languages are spoken in EU countries, although EU laws are not translated to other languages (https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-languages_en). ## Additional Information ### Dataset Curators Chalkidis et al. (2021) ### Licensing Information We provide MultiEURLEX with the same licensing as the original EU data (CC-BY-4.0): © European Union, 1998-2021 The Commission’s document reuse policy is based on Decision 2011/833/EU. Unless otherwise specified, you can re-use the legal documents published in EUR-Lex for commercial or non-commercial purposes. The copyright for the editorial content of this website, the summaries of EU legislation and the consolidated texts, which is owned by the EU, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. This means that you can re-use the content provided you acknowledge the source and indicate any changes you have made. Source: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/content/legal-notice/legal-notice.html \ Read more: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/content/help/faq/reuse-contents-eurlex.html ### Citation Information *Ilias Chalkidis, Manos Fergadiotis, and Ion Androutsopoulos.* *MultiEURLEX - A multi-lingual and multi-label legal document classification dataset for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer.* *Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. 2021* ``` @InProceedings{chalkidis-etal-2021-multieurlex, author = {Chalkidis, Ilias and Fergadiotis, Manos and Androutsopoulos, Ion}, title = {MultiEURLEX -- A multi-lingual and multi-label legal document classification dataset for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing}, year = {2021}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, location = {Punta Cana, Dominican Republic}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.00904} } ``` ### Contributions Thanks to [@iliaschalkidis](https://github.com/iliaschalkidis) for adding this dataset.