DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15746419
title: ProLiFIC: Procedural Lawmaking Flow in Italian Chambers

description:  



Overview

This is a snapshot of the GitHub repository



https://github.com/matildeec/ProLiFIC

Done on 26/06/2025





ProLiFIC's content and context


ProLiFIC (Procedural Lawmaking Flow in Italian Chambers) is a comprehensive dataset documenting the Italian legislative process from 1987 to 2022, spanning from Legislature X (1987–1992) to Legislature XVIII (2018–2022).



ProLiFIC has been built using unstructured textual data (preparatory works) available in Normattiva, the official Italian legal archive:



As of the time of writing, these are all the complete legislatures available in Normattiva which have been equipped with Preparatory works

We plan to update the dataset when data on newly completed legislatures will be available






Alignment with recent Legal PM and PM-LLMs trends






Developed to support Process Mining (PM) analyses in legal settings, ProLiFIC aligns with recent trends in Legal PM:



See, e.g., Challenges in Legal Process Discovery





ProLiFIC has been built using an automated pipeline exploiting Large Language Models (LLM), aligning with recent trends aiming at integrating PM and LLM. We use LLMs to convert unstructured legislative records into structured, machine-readable event logs:



See, e.g., the workshop series on Natural Language Processing for Business Process Management and on Generative AI for Process Mining






Contribution to the Business Process Management (BPM) field


While PM has traditionally been used in business and industrial contexts, its application to social and legal systems has been limited. One of the reasons is the scarcity of suitable data. ProLiFIC aims to fill this gap by providing a large-scale, reproducible benchmark for legal PM and interdisciplinary research at the intersection of law, data science, and governance.



Repository Contents


This repository includes:





ProLiFIC_metadata.csvMetadata for each legislative case (one row per law), including title, publication dates, institutional context, and summaries.




ProLiFIC_event_log.csvA procedural event log detailing the legislative trajectory of each case: timestamps, activities, and actors (committees, chambers) involved.




ProLiFIC_EDA.ipynbA Jupyter notebook for exploratory data analysis of the ProLiFIC dataset. It includes loading and merging metadata with event logs, parsing timestamps, generating descriptive statistics, calculating case durations, and producing visualizations to support process mining and institutional research.




ProLiFIC_error_cases.txtA plain-text list of case_ids that were either corrected or excluded due to formatting and structural issues from legislatures X–XVIII.





File Descriptions




ProLiFIC_metadata.csv


Each row corresponds to a single legislative case. The fields are:




Attribute
Description




case_id
Unique identifier for the law


title
Official title of the law


legislature
Legislature number (e.g., X, XI, ..., XVIII)


government
Name of the government in office during proposal or approval


publishing_date
Date of publication in the Gazzetta Ufficiale


implementation_date
Date the law takes effect (typically 15 days after publication)


decree_conversion
Indicates whether the law is a conversion of a decree-law


eu_ratification
Indicates whether the law responds to EU directives or regulations


articles
Number of articles in the law


description
Summary of the law’s content and intent


full_text_url
Link to the full legal text on Normattiva




More details can be found in the paper linked at the bottom of this page



ProLiFIC_event_log.csv


Each row corresponds to a legislative event. The fields are:




Attribute
Description




case_id
Unique identifier for the law (foreign key to ProLiFIC_metadata.csv)


chamber
Legislative chamber: Camera (Chamber of deputies) or Senato (Senate)


activity_it
Type of legislative action in Italian (e.g., presentazione, approvazione)


activity_en
English translation of the action type


time
Date of the activity (day-level granularity)


committee
Committee involved in the event (if applicable)


person
Sponsor, speaker, or institutional actor involved


chunk
Textual snippet related to the legislative activity (speech or document)




More details can be found in the paper linked at the bottom of this page



ProLiFIC_error_cases.txt


A plain-text list of problematic case_ids. These were either:



Corrected manually (e.g., malformed HTML, inconsistent dates), or

Excluded due to irrecoverable structural issues (e.g., missing event chains).




ProLiFIC_EDA.ipynb


A Jupyter notebook that demonstrates:



How to load and join the metadata and event logs via case_id

Filtering and cleaning methods (e.g., by legislature, date, chamber)

Prepare data for process mining with pm4py

Generate visualizations to compute descriptive statistics and explore temporal patterns




import pandas as pd

metadata = pd.read_csv("data/ProLiFIC_metadata.csv")
event_log = pd.read_csv("data/ProLiFIC_event_log.csv")

# Join metadata and event logs on case_id
df = pd.merge(event_log, metadata, on="case_id")

 




License


This project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).You are free to share and adapt the material, as long as it is not for commercial purposes, and provided that you give appropriate credit.See the full license details at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/



© 2025 Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies Pisa, and contributors to the ProLiFIC dataset.This dataset is provided as is, without warranties of any kind. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy and consistency of the data, ProLiFIC may contain errors, omissions, or artifacts inherited from the source documents.


Legal texts were derived from Normattiva, the official Italian legal archive. According to Normattiva:



"La riproduzione dei testi forniti nel formato elettronico è consentita purché venga menzionata la fonte, il carattere non autentico e gratuito."(The reproduction of texts in electronic format is allowed, provided that the source is mentioned and the non-authentic and free-of-charge nature is indicated.)


We acknowledge and respect these terms by citing Normattiva and clearly indicating that ProLiFIC is a derived, non-authentic resource intended for research and academic use only.



Citation


If you use the ProLiFIC dataset in academic or applied research, please cite it as follows:



@inproceedings{2025prolific,
  title        = {The ProLiFIC Dataset: Leveraging LLMs to Unveil the Italian Lawmaking Process},
  author       = {Matilde Contestabile and Chiara Ferrara and Alberto Giovannetti and Giovanni Parrillo and Andrea Vandin},
  booktitle    = {BPM 2025 Demos \& Resources Forum, part of BPM 2025},
  year         = {2025},
  url          = {[]},
  note         = {Dataset available at \url{[]}. Under review for BPM 2025 Demos \& Resources Forum.}
}

 


📌 Note: This dataset is part of a paper currently under review at the BPM 2025 Demos & Resources Forum. We will update this citation with a DOI and formal reference once available