---
license: cc-by-4.0
language:
  - en
pretty_name: Australian Commonwealth Legislation (jurisd legislation-cth)
tags:
  - legal
  - australian-law
  - legislation
  - commonwealth
  - statute
  - embeddings
  - retrieval
  - citation-graph
size_categories:
  - 100K<n<1M
task_categories:
  - feature-extraction
  - sentence-similarity
  - text-retrieval
source_datasets:
  - umarbutler/open-australian-legal-corpus
configs:
  - config_name: documents
    data_files: documents.parquet
  - config_name: chunks
    data_files: chunks.parquet
  - config_name: edges
    data_files: edges.parquet
  - config_name: unmatched_citations
    data_files: unmatched_citations.parquet
---

# legislation-cth — Australian Commonwealth Legislation (jurisd data module)

A self-contained, offline retrieval module for the **full Commonwealth of Australia
legislation corpus**: primary Acts and legislative instruments from the Federal
Register of Legislation, segmented into chunks, locally embedded, and cross-linked
into a citation graph. It is the baseline data module for
[jurisd](https://github.com/russellbrenner/jurisd), an MCP server for
Australian/NZ legal research.

Everything here is **CC-BY-4.0 and redistributable** — Commonwealth legislation
under the Federal Register of Legislation's CC-BY-4.0 terms, with embeddings
generated locally by an open model. No case law (court material is excluded for
licensing reasons) and no state/territory legislation.

## At a glance

| | |
|---|---|
| Jurisdiction | Commonwealth of Australia |
| Documents | 32,143 (4,661 primary Acts + 27,482 legislative instruments) |
| Chunks | 857,262 |
| Citation-graph edges | 927,210 (783,336 act–provision, 143,874 cites) |
| Embedding model | `BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5` (384-dim, L2-normalised) |
| Licence | CC-BY-4.0 |
| Snapshot date | 2026-06-13 |
| Module version | 0.1.0 |

## Files

| File | Rows | Description |
|------|------|-------------|
| `documents.parquet` | 32,143 | One row per legislation document: `version_id`, `work_id`, `type`, `jurisdiction`, `source`, `citation`, `url`, `date`. |
| `chunks.parquet` | 857,262 | Segmented text with inline embeddings: `chunk_id`, `version_id`, `segment_type`, `provision_ref`, `char_start`, `char_end`, `text`, `facet`, `facet_confidence`, `embedding` (`fixed_size_list<float>[384]`). |
| `edges.parquet` | 927,210 | Citation graph: act–provision containment and cross-document `cites` edges. |
| `unmatched_citations.parquet` | 25,399 | Detected citations that did not resolve to an in-corpus target (provenance / coverage honesty). |
| `manifest.json` | — | Machine-readable module descriptor: per-file `sha256` + row counts, embedding descriptor, licence block, and the `base_uri` jurisd resolves files against. |

The embeddings are **inline** in `chunks.parquet`, so the module is fully
self-contained: no separate vector store and no embedding step needed to query it.

## Use with jurisd

The jurisd MCP server installs and queries this module directly:

```bash
jurisd fetch-module legislation-cth     # downloads + verifies against manifest sha256
jurisd verify-module legislation-cth
```

A query is embedded locally with the same `bge-small-en-v1.5` model and ranked by
cosine similarity over the inline chunk embeddings, entirely offline.

## Source and provenance

Built from the [Open Australian Legal Corpus](https://huggingface.co/datasets/umarbutler/open-australian-legal-corpus),
filtered to Commonwealth primary and secondary legislation. Provenance is pinned in
`manifest.json` via the corpus sha256 and the recipe git commit; per-file integrity
is enforced by jurisd's `fetch-module` against the manifest `sha256` values on
download.

## Licence and attribution

Released under **CC-BY-4.0**. When redistributing, retain:

- Contains material from the Open Australian Legal Corpus, CC BY 4.0.
- Federal Register of Legislation material © Commonwealth of Australia, CC BY 4.0.
- Embeddings generated locally with `BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5` (open, ONNX); offline module class.

## Citation

```bibtex
@misc{jurisd_legislation_cth_2026,
  title        = {legislation-cth: Australian Commonwealth Legislation retrieval module},
  author       = {Brenner, Russell},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {Hugging Face Datasets},
  url          = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/workingmem/legislation-cth}
}
```

Contact: contact@workingmem.ai