Regulatory citations play a crucial role in legal and compliance-related domains, as they are used to indicate the specific regulations or laws that govern certain actions or behaviors. However, the process of extracting these citations from textual content is a non-trivial task, as the citations may appear in a variety of different formats and may be written in a way that makes them difficult to identify automatically. In this blog post, we will explore three different approaches to extracting regulatory citations from textual content that can be found in a legal document of an Enforcement Action: regular expressions, the spacy NLP library, and a combination of both approaches.
Approach 1: Regular Expressions
Regular expressions are a powerful tool for pattern matching and text manipulation. They can be used to extract specific strings of text that match a particular pattern, which makes them a natural choice for extracting regulatory citations from textual content.