February 2024, Kick-off meeting in Bologna: refine the structure, methodology and timeline of the project, specify the partners’ tasks, and establish intermediate deadlines
January 2024 – February 2025: theoretical and empirical comparative study on the notion of Judicial Interpretative Formula (JIF) in national and EU law. For the empirical analysis, four sets of judgements were collected in the field of VAT: one set of CJEU preliminary rulings decisions, under the direction of EUI and UNIBO; three sets of judgements of national Supreme Courts (Bulgarian under the direction of APIS; Italian under the direction of EUI and UNIBO); Swedish under the direction of ORU).
August 2024 – September 2025: use of LLM models and prompt engineering to analyse legal documents, extract JIFs, and connect them with related VAT concepts of the ontology. The models were able to process all the languages contemplated by POLINE: Italian, Bulgarian, Swedish, and English.
September 2024 – September 2025: validation by experts and error analysis of the automatic extraction thourgh LLMs. Iterative process relying on both quantitative and qualitative methods.
August 2024 – September 2025: development of NLP techniques to automatically recognise JIFS, both in the European and in the three national datasets of case-law, and assess their similarity with other JIFs. The training used a supervised system based on the LLM extraction used as a silver standard.
February 2024 – October 2025: elaboration of technical documentation, development of back-end infrastructure and development of the end-user interface for the platform.
April 2025 – December 2025: mid-term online testing events involving legal practitioners organised respectively by EUI for Italy, by APIS for Bulgaria, and by ORU for Sweden to demonstrate the tool's provisional functionalities and gain feedback for requirements specification. In addition, three demonstration events (one in Italy, one in Bulgaria, one in Sweden) to show the final functionality of the tool at the end of the project.
