Datasets:

lexgenie
/

echr-guide-paragraph-diffs

pretty_name: ECHR Guide Paragraph Diffs
language:
  - en
tags:
  - legal
  - echr
  - temporal
  - paragraphs
  - dataset-creation
size_categories:
  - 10K<n<100K

Dataset Card for ECHR Guide Paragraph Diffs

Dataset Summary

This dataset contains paragraph-level and section-level diffs between consecutive versions of European Court of Human Rights case law guide PDFs.

Each JSON file covers one guide version transition and records paragraph-by-paragraph changes (additions, deletions, edits, moves), section structural events (additions, deletions, renames), and cited-case list diffs.

It is the primary source corpus used to build lexgenie/echr-case-linked-guide-diffs — the modeling-ready citation-change layer.

Dataset Structure

Files are organized by guide directory (39 guide directories, 145 JSON files total):

<guide_id>/
    diff_<date_a>__<date_b>.json
    ...

Each JSON file has the following top-level keys:

version_a, version_b: ISO date strings for the two guide snapshots
delta_days: number of days between versions
guide_title: human-readable guide name
summary: aggregate counts by change type
section_events: list of section-level structural events
paragraph_changes: list of paragraph-level change records
cited_cases_diff: {added: [...], removed: [...]} citation list diffs

Paragraph change record fields

Field	Description
`change_type`	One of: `unchanged`, `minor_edit`, `citation_added`, `citation_updated`, `citation_removed`, `reformulation`, `paragraph_added`, `paragraph_deleted`, `section_moved`, `section_moved_modified`
`section_path`	Hierarchical section identifier
`section_title`	Section heading text
`section_level`	Nesting depth
`para_num_a`, `para_num_b`	Paragraph index in version A and B
`similarity`	Text similarity score (0–1)
`text_a`, `text_b`	Paragraph text before and after
`citations_added`, `citations_removed`	Per-paragraph citation deltas
`moved_from`, `moved_to`	Section move provenance (when applicable)

Dataset Statistics

Guide directories: 39
Diff files: 145
Total paragraph changes (all types): 39148
Of which minor edits: 6342
Of which paragraph additions: 1877
Of which paragraph deletions: 1418
Of which citation additions: 2147
Section events: 689 (238 added, 237 deleted, 192 renamed, 22 title-changed)
Cited cases added across all transitions: 2987
Cited cases removed across all transitions: 1084
Total size: ~83 MB

Intended Use

This dataset is intended for:

temporal guide-body analysis across ECHR case law guides
paragraph-level change classification
section localization for case-linked guide updates
training and evaluation of guide-update generation models

Provenance

Produced by Anas Belfathi from Wayback Machine PDF snapshots of ECHR-KS guides (2022–2025). Paragraph alignment and diff computation use a custom PDF-parsing and text-alignment pipeline.

The guide snapshot archive is not publicly distributed due to size and licensing considerations; the Wayback Machine URLs are documented in wayback/*/snapshot_metadata.jsonl in the lexgenie/lexgenie repository.

See lexgenie/echr-guide-citation-diffs for the underlying PDF snapshot metadata and citation-list diffs, and lexgenie/echr-case-linked-guide-diffs for the modeling-ready downstream layer.