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Record W160071724

Plain English in Quebec Legislation

2007· article· en· W160071724 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Lena Day

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLegal Language and Interpretation
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLegislationStatuteMeaning (existential)Plain languageArgument (complex analysis)LawAffect (linguistics)Political sciencePlain EnglishLaw and economicsSociologyPsychologyMedicineCommunication
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Why is it that the average person, even a well-educated one, setting out to read a bill or law for the first time, half if not fully expects to have trouble cutting through the language to get to the meaning? It could be argued that bills and statutes use complex language because they address complex subjects?taxation or securities regulation, for example?or because they are meant mainly for people ?in the know? such as members of lobby groups, practitioners in the fields concerned, lawyers and officials. The bottom line, though, is that laws affect everyone and this alone is a compelling argument for using idiomatic and understandable language. This article looks at efforts made by the Quebec National Assembly to introduce plain English in its legislation.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.078
Threshold uncertainty score0.564

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0100.008
Scholarly communication0.0060.002
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0180.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.008
GPT teacher head0.297
Teacher spread0.289 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2007
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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