{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,6]],"date-time":"2026-02-06T20:54:33Z","timestamp":1770411273856,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":36,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,5]],"date-time":"2026-02-05T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1770249600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Information"],"abstract":"<jats:p>This paper presents a computational framework for constructing and analysing a focal legislative citation network. A depth-limited expansion strategy generates subgraphs of the network that capture the local structural environment of a seed Act while avoiding the global hub dominance present in whole-corpus analyses. Centrality measures and community detection show how the seed Act\u2019s perceived influence changes with network radius. To incorporate semantic information, we develop and apply an Large Language Model (LLM)-assisted topic modelling method in which representative keywords and LLM-generated summaries form a compact text representation that is converted into a Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF\u2013IDF) document\u2013term matrix. Although demonstrated on New Zealand\u2019s mental health legislation, the framework generalises to any legislative corpus or jurisdiction. Integrating graph-theoretic structure with LLM-assisted semantic modelling provides a scalable approach for analysing legislative systems, identifying domain-specific clusters, and supporting computational studies of legal evolution and policy impact.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/info17020161","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,5]],"date-time":"2026-02-05T15:24:19Z","timestamp":1770305059000},"page":"161","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Computational and Graph-Theoretic Analysis of Legislative Networks: New Zealand\u2019s Mental Health Act as a Case Study"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"17","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9476-9539","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Iman","family":"Ardekani","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing, Electrical and Applied Technology, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland 1025, New Zealand"},{"name":"School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Notre Dame Australia (Sydeney Campus), Darlinghurst, NSW 2007, Australia"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0006-4727-6081","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Maryam","family":"Ildoromi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing, Electrical and Applied Technology, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland 1025, New Zealand"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0006-1913-780X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Neda","family":"Sakhaee","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Macquarie Business School, Macquarie University, Macquarie Park, NSW 2113, Australia"}]},{"given":"Sewmini","family":"Gunawardhana","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing, Electrical and Applied Technology, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland 1025, New Zealand"}]},{"given":"Parmida","family":"Raeis","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Science, The University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,5]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel Office (2018, October 31). 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