---
license: apache-2.0
pipeline_tag: question-answering
tags:
- law article retrieval
- natural language processing
- information retrieval
- legal ai
- italian civil code
language:
- it
---

### Abstract

The Italian Civil Code, hereinafter referred to as ICC, is the legislation source containing norms that regulate private law in Italy and it consists of 2969 articles. This number actually corresponds to 3225 articles considering all variants and subsequent insertions, which are designated by using Latin-term suffixes (e.g., “bis”, “ter”, “quater”). Then, we obtain a total of 3039 if we remove the articles no longer in force (i.e., articles which are replaced by other laws). Enacted by Royal decree no. 262 of March 16, 1942, the ICC has been involved in a perpetual process of refinements and enhancements, and subjected to numerous reorganizations to stay updated with respect to legislative needs and social development. Indeed, during its history, the ICC was revised several times and subjected to repealings, i.e., per-article partial or total insertions, modifications and removals; to date, 2294 articles have been repealed. The ICC is compiled as an organic corpus relating to the fundamental and constitutional civil laws. In addition to the organization into various books and their sections, the corpus and its constituent articles have an additional structure that is described by cross-article references. These are citations that may occur in the content of an article to refer to one or more articles, from either the same or different books, and hence they are exploited by legislators to clarify the scope and the semantics of specific articles. The Italian Civil Code (ICC) is divided into six, logically coherent books, each in charge of providing rules for a particular civil law theme:
Book-1, on Persons and the Family, articles 1-455 – contains the discipline of the juridical capacity of persons, of the rights of the personality, of collective organizations, of the family;
Book-2, on Successions, articles 456-809 – contains the discipline of succession due to
death and the donation contract;
Book-3, on Property, articles 810-1172 – contains the discipline of ownership and other real rights;
Book-4, on Obligations, articles 1173-2059 – contains the discipline of obligations and their sources, that is mainly of contracts and illicit facts (the so-called civil liability);
Book-5, on Labor, articles 2060-2642 – contains the discipline of the company in general, of subordinate and self-employed work, of profit-making companies and of competition;
Book-6, on the Protection of Rights, articles 2643-2969 – contains the discipline of the transcription, of the proofs, of the debtor’s financial liability and of the causes of pre-emption, of the prescription.
The articles of each book are internally organized into a hierarchical structure based on four levels of division, namely (from top to bottom in the hierarchy): “titoli” (i.e., chapters), “capi” (i.e., subchapters), “sezioni” (i.e., sections), and “paragrafi” (i.e., paragraphs). It should however be emphasized that this hierarchical classification was not meant as a crisp, ground-
truth organization of the articles’ contents: indeed, the topical boundaries of contiguous chapters and subchapters are often quite smooth, as articles in the same group often not only vary in length but can also provide dispositions that are more related to articles in other groups.
The ICC is obviously publicly available, in various digital formats. From one of such sources, we extracted article id, title and content of each article. We cleaned up the text from non-ASCII characters, removed numbers and date, normalized all variants and abbreviations of frequent keywords such as “articolo” (i.e., article), “decreto legislativo” (i.e., legislative decree), “Gazzetta Ufficiale” (i.e., Official Gazette), and finally we lowercased all letters.

### Italian Civil Code (ICC) with Article References

![image/jpeg](https://cdn-uploads.huggingface.co/production/uploads/62867cb4504d3770030ae173/OSP6PhUlH5kf-2ioSrg9n.jpeg)

### BibTeX Entry and Citation Info
```
@article{Lamberta,
  author    = {Andrea Tagarelli and Andrea Simeri},
  title     = {{Unsupervised law article mining based on deep pre-trained language representation models with application to the Italian civil code}},
  journal   = {Artif. Intell. Law},
  volume    = {30(3)}, 
  pages     = {417--473. Published: 15 September 2021},
  year      = {2022}, 
  doi ={10.1007/s10506-021-09301-8}
}
```

### References
- Tagarelli, A., Simeri, A. Unsupervised law article mining based on deep pre-trained language representation models with application to the Italian civil code. Artif Intell Law 30, 417–473 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-021-09301-8

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