Automated Extraction of Judicial Interpretative Formulas in EU Case Law on VAT

This paper addresses the extraction of Judicial Interpretative Formulas (JIFs) in decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on Value Added Tax (VAT). European case law includes a significant number of JIFs on this subject, which are crucial for the interpretation of VAT. However, extracting such JIFs manually is effortful, and doing that automatically has not been investigated yet in the VAT domain. Our work proposes the first pipeline method for doing so. Westart by defining a set of guidelines for annotating legal texts following a principle definition of JIF. By following such guidelines, we obtain a corpus of 21 expertlabeled CJEU decisions. We keep them for validation and testing. For training, we machine-annotate 80 additional decisions using LLMs. Our experiments show that BERT-based architectures trained on such data perform comparably to LLMs.