Overview of smart functionalities in drafting legislation in LEOS

The report presents the findings of a study conducted between June 2023 and February 2024 to assess the potential of introducing smart functionalities to the Legislation Editing Open Software (LEOS) system. The goal of the study was to contribute to developing LEOS into a future-proof tool that can support the entire legislative process. It builds on a previous reference study that identified 34 potential smart functionalities grouped into nine categories.

Through interviews and questionnaires with experts from the European Commission (EC), the study refined the initial categories into seven distinct ones: verification, change tracking, linguistic support, legal assistance, automated drafting, legal practices, and policy dimension. Subsequently, it prioritised 11 smart functionalities for in-depth analysis.

The prioritised smart functionalities were investigated in terms of user experience needs, business value, relevant technology, data requirements, and performance considerations. In addition, five core technologies were identified as suitable for implementing them: Advanced Language Editing and Correction, Named Entity Recognition, Semantic Similarity, Natural Language Generation, and Information Extraction.