  Textual redundancy is one of the main challenges to ensuring that legal texts
remain comprehensible and maintainable. Drawing inspiration from the
refactoring literature in software engineering, which has developed methods to
expose and eliminate duplicated code, we introduce the duplicated phrase
detection problem for legal texts and propose the Dupex algorithm to solve it.
Leveraging the Minimum Description Length principle from information theory,
Dupex identifies a set of duplicated phrases, called patterns, that together
best compress a given input text. Through an extensive set of experiments on
the Titles of the United States Code, we confirm that our algorithm works well
in practice: Dupex will help you simplify your law.
