tseidl/eu-acquis-regulatory-tone
eu-acquis-regulatory-tone
Regulatory tone of an EU legislative article: obligation, prohibition, permission, or none.
Fine-tuned ModernBERT-large encoder from the paper Mapping Europe's Digital Acquis (Seidl & Kosti, 2026). The model classifies individual provisions of EU regulations, directives, and decisions — recitals and (sub-)articles as extracted with eurlex-builder — and was trained on labels produced by a five-model LLM ensemble whose coding instructions were validated against two human coders.
Labels
obligation, prohibition, permission, none. Applies to: articles only (recitals carry no deontic force).
Training
- Base model:
answerdotai/ModernBERT-large(ModernBertForSequenceClassification); max length at training 1024 tokens. - Training data: provisions labelled by the LLM ensemble (majority vote of Qwen3-235B, Llama-3.3-70B, gpt-oss-120b, GPT-5.2, DeepSeek-V4 Pro); soft labels (per-class vote fractions); negative:positive ratio 4:1.
- Hyperparameters: learning rate 2e-05, weight decay 0.1, 5 epochs.
- Saved 2026-06-02.
Evaluation
- Held-out distillation test (agreement with the ensemble's labels): F1 = 0.936.
- Against the human-coded validation set (n = 292, training items excluded by id): agreement 0.918, Krippendorff's α = 0.862.
- Same, additionally excluding validation items whose exact text recurs in the training pool (n = 272): α = 0.855.
- For reference: the LLM ensemble reaches α = 0.883 against the same coder; the two human coders agree at α = 0.903.
Full validation design, error rates at natural prevalence, temporal stability, prompt stability, and interpretability checks are in the paper's online appendix.
Intended use and limits
- Input: one provision of EU secondary legislation in English (the
textfield as produced by eurlex-builder). The model was trained on provisions of 50 or more characters; very long provisions were truncated at 1,024 tokens during training. - Scope: articles only (recitals carry no deontic force). Applying it to other document types (communications, national law, case law) is untested.
- Classification error is documented but not zero; for aggregate analyses, see the paper's discussion of error rates and their correction.
Usage
from transformers import pipeline
clf = pipeline("text-classification", model="tseidl/eu-acquis-regulatory-tone", truncation=True, max_length=1024)
clf("Member States shall ensure that all consumers have access to an adequate broadband internet access service at an affordable price.")Citation
Seidl, T. & Kosti, N. (2026). Mapping Europe's Digital Acquis: A Granular History of EU Digital Policymaking. Preprint.
Corpus construction: eurlex-builder (https://github.com/tseidl/eurlex-builder; archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21496963).
Model card generated 2026-09-16 from the training metadata and the paper's validation results file.
