Meru Gopalan
2025
Legal-CGEL: Analyzing Legal Text in the CGELBank Framework
Brandon Waldon
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Micaela Wells
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Devika Tiwari
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Meru Gopalan
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Nathan Schneider
Proceedings of the 23rd International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT, SyntaxFest 2025)
We introduce Legal-CGEL, an ongoing treebanking project focused on syntactic analysis of legal English text in the CGELBank framework (Reynolds et al., 2022), with an initial focus on US statutory law. When it comes to treebanking for legal English, we argue that there are unique advantages to employing CGELBank, a formalism that extends a comprehensive—and authoritative—formal description of English syntax (the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language; Huddleston & Pullum, 2002). We discuss some analytical challenges that have arisen in extending CGELBank to the legal domain. We conclude with a summary of immediate and longer-term project goals.