Concept Analysis Tools
Open-source tools for researchers working with large corpora like constitutions and court rulings. Developed by CCP’s Concept Integration in Comparative Law project, these tools help assess textual and thematic similarity, expand topic coverage, and formulate new concepts for corpus analysis.
The Tools
Constitution Comparison Tool
Systematically assess the similarity of constitutions through two lenses: textual alignment (whether drafters use the same language) and thematic alignment (whether constitutions address similar topics regardless of wording).
Example questions this tool can answer:
- How much does a draft constitution change throughout drafting?
- Does a constitution borrow language from others in the region?
- Which constitutions are outliers in a set?
Domain Comparison Tool
Expand and improve the topics tracked in texts by drawing from multiple ontologies—potentially representing multiple domains—and identifying these topics in your corpus.
Example questions this tool can answer:
- What is the conceptual overlap between two ontologies?
- Which topics from new ontologies capture more nuance?
- Should topics from other domains be added to an ontology?
Segments-As-Topics Tool
Formulate new topics using segments from your corpus itself to represent concepts, producing more accurate automated matching with human intervention at just a few key points.
Key capabilities:
- Assess the best formulation of a potential new topic
- Identify that topic throughout the corpus
- Produce an exhaustive set of matching segments
Who They’re For
Comparative Scholars
Track constitutional borrowing, assess drafting evolution, and identify regional patterns across large sets of constitutional texts.
Legal Researchers
Analyze court rulings and legal corpora systematically. Expand topical coverage and identify conceptual gaps in existing coding schemes.
Corpus Analysts
Work with any large text corpus beyond constitutions. The tools are domain-agnostic and can be adapted to legislative texts, treaties, and more.
A Project of the Concept Integration Lab
These tools are developed and maintained by the Concept Integration Lab as part of CCP’s Concept Integration in Comparative Law project. The research team developed and tested the tools for its own constitutional analysis and is now making them publicly available for the broader research community.
Each repository includes instructions, applications, and sample data to help you get started.