🇫🇷 French Consolidated Legislation Dataset (LEGI)

This dataset contains a semantic-ready and embedded version of the French full consolidated text of national legislation and regulations as published in the official LEGI database by Légifrance. The original data is downloaded from the dedicated DILA open data repository and is also published on data.gouv.fr.

The original and full LEGI dataset includes:

• All laws, codes, decrees, circulars, deliberations, decree-laws, ordinances etc... since 1945.
• A selection of consolidated ministerial orders (arrêtés).
• All 73 official codes in force, and 29 repealed codes.
• And more ...

In this version, only versions of articles that are currently in force (VIGUEUR) or abrogated deferred (ABROGE_DIFF) are included.

Each article is chunked and vectorized using the BAAI/bge-m3 embedding model, enabling use in semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and legal research systems for example.

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🗂️ Dataset Contents

The dataset is provided in Parquet format and includes the following columns:

Column Name	Type	Description
chunk_id	str	Unique chunk identifier.
cid	str	LEGI article source identifier.
chunk_number	int	Index of the chunk within the article.
nature	str	Nature of the text (e.g., Article).
category	str	Type of legislative document (e.g., LOI, DECRET, ARRETE, etc.).
ministry	str	Ministry responsible for the publication, if applicable.
status	str	Status of the article: VIGUEUR (in force) or ABROGE_DIFF (abrogated deferred).
title	str	Short title of the legislative document.
full_title	str	Full formal title of the text.
subtitles	str	Subtitle(s) indicating article grouping or section.
number	str	Article or section number.
start_date	str	Date the article entered into force (format: YYYY-MM-DD).
end_date	str	End of validity date (or 2999-01-01 if still in force).
nota	str	Additional notes, if present.
text	str	Textual content chunk of the article (or subsection).
chunk_text	str	Formatted full chunk including full_title, number, formatted subtitles and text.
embeddings_bge-m3	str	Embedding vector of chunk_text using BAAI/bge-m3, stored as JSON array string.

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🛠️ Data Processing Methodology

📥 1. Field Extraction

The following fields were extracted and/or transformed from the original source:

• Basic fields:

  • cid, nature, category, ,ministry,status, title, full_title, subtitles, number, and start_date, end_date are extracted directly from the metadata of each article.

• Generated fields:

  • chunk_id: a generated unique identifier combining the cid and chunk_number.
  • chunk_number: index of the chunk from the original decision.

• Textual fields:

  • nota: additional notes, also directly extracted from metadatas.
  • text: chunk of the main text content.
  • chunk_text: generated by concatenating full_title, article number, formatted subtitles and text.

✂️ 2. Generation of 'chunk_text'

Each article is naturally isolated and has its own cid value. But in case the article is too long, we have to split it in several chunks. The Langchain's RecursiveCharacterTextSplitter function was used to make these chunks, which correspond to the text value. The parameters used are :

• chunk_size = 5000
• chunk_overlap = 250
• length_function = len

For each chunk (text), a chunk_text is constructed as follows:

"{full_title} - Article {number}
{formatted subtitles}
{text}"

🧠 3. Embeddings Generation

Each chunk_text was embedded using the BAAI/bge-m3 model. The resulting embedding vector is stored in the embeddings_bge-m3 column as a string, but can easily be parsed back into a list[float] or NumPy array.

📌 Embedding Use Notice

⚠️ The embeddings_bge-m3 column is stored as a stringified list of floats (e.g., "[-0.03062629,-0.017049594,...]"). To use it as a vector, you need to parse it into a list of floats or NumPy array. For example, if you want to load the dataset into a dataframe :

import pandas as pd
import json

df = pd.read_parquet("legi-latest.parquet")
df["embeddings_bge-m3"] = df["embeddings_bge-m3"].apply(json.loads)

📚 Source & License

🔗 Source :

• DILA open data repository
• Data.gouv.fr : LEGI: Codes, lois et règlements consolidés

📄 Licence :

Open License (Etalab) — This dataset is publicly available and can be reused under the conditions of the Etalab open license.