Diffusion of International Law: A Textual Analysis of International Investment Agreements

In the project, we create a new XML-based database which contains various types of texts of international investment agreements (IIAs), including texts of bilateral investment treaties (BITs), and the relevant parts of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), and commitments on trade in services under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and obligations from double taxation agreements (DTAs). This database enables to assess more systematically and accurately the levels of the commitments in light of multiple agreements with partially contradicting obligations. Second, this new database will serve as the empirical backbone for answering a set of important questions related to understanding the design, evolution and effects of IIA.

• Creation of XML data from multi-lingual and multi-format treaties
• Information extraction
• Document classification
• Statistical machine translation for treaties

• Martin Volk (project head)
• Laura Mascarell
• Annette Rios
• Kyoko Sugisaki