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Open Australian Legal Corpus Creator

The Open Australian Legal Corpus is the first and only multijurisdictional open corpus of Australian legislative and judicial documents. This repository contains the code used to create and update the Corpus.

To learn more about the Corpus and how it was built, please see Umar Butler's article, How I built the largest open database of Australian law. If you're looking to download the Corpus, you may do so on Hugging Face.

Requirements

The Open Australian Legal Corpus Creator requires Python 3.10 or higher, along with tesserocr.

Before running the Creator, it is essential that you are authorised to scrape and use the sources' data.

Installation

Install tesserocr by following the instructions here and then run the following command:

pip install git+https://github.com/umarbutler/open-australian-legal-corpus-creator

Usage

To create or update the Corpus, simply call mkoalc from the command line. By default, this will output the Corpus to a file named corpus.jsonl in the current working directory. Checkpoints and other Corpus data will be stored in your user data directory.

The Creator's default behaviour may be modified by passing the following optional arguments to mkoalc:

  • -s/--sources: The names of the sources to be scraped, delimited by commas. Possible sources are federal_court_of_australia, federal_register_of_legislation, high_court_of_australia, nsw_legislation, nsw_caselaw, queensland_legislation, south_australian_legislation, western_australian_legislation and tasmanian_legislation. Defaults to all supported sources.
  • -o/--output: The path to the Corpus. Defaults to a file named corpus.jsonl in the current working directory.
  • -d/--data_dir: The path to the directory in which Corpus data should be stored. Defaults to the user's data directory as determined by platformdirs.user_data_dir (on Windows, this will be C:/Users/<username>/AppData/Local/Umar Butler/Open Australian Legal Corpus).
  • -n/--num_threads: The number of threads to use for OCRing PDFs with tesseract. Defaults to the number of logical CPUs on the system minus one, or one if there is only one logical CPU.
  • m/--max-concurrent-ocr: The maximum number of PDFs that may be OCR'd concurrently. Defaults to 1.

As an example, if you wanted to output the Corpus to ~/corpus/oalc.jsonl, save Corpus data to ~/app_data/oalc/ and scrape only the Federal Court of Australia and Federal Register of Legislation, you would run:

mkoalc -s federal_court_of_australia,federal_register_of_legislation -o ~/corpus/oalc.jsonl -d ~/app_data/oalc/

For even greater control over the Creator's behaviour, you may also access it from the oalc_creator Python package:

from asyncio import run as async_run # or, if on Linux, `from uvloop import run as async_run`.
from oalc_creator import Creator

# Create a Creator instance.
creator = Creator(
    sources=['federal_court_of_australia', 'federal_register_of_legislation'],
    corpus_path='~/corpus/oalc.jsonl',
    data_dir='~/app_data/oalc/',
)

# Create or update the Corpus.
async_run(creator.create()) # `await creator.create()` if you are already in an event loop (eg, in a Jupyter notebook).

By creating your own subclasses of oalc_creator.Scraper and then passing them to oalc_creator.Creator as the sources argument, you can add support for custom sources. Examples of scrapers are available in src/oalc_creator/scrapers. You are encouraged to contribute scrapers for new sources via pull requests.

Licence

The Creator is licensed under the MIT License.