The objective of this paper is to develop predictive models to classify Brazilian legal proceedings in three possible classes of status: (i) archived proceedings, (ii) active proceedings, and (iii) suspended proceedings. This problem's resolution is intended to assist public and private institutions in managing large portfolios of legal proceedings, providing gains in scale and efficiency. In this paper, legal proceedings are made up of sequences of short texts called "motions." We combined several natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to solve the problem. Although working with Portuguese NLP, which can be challenging due to lack of resources, our approaches performed remarkably well in the classification task, achieving maximum accuracy of .93 and top average F1 Scores of .89 (macro) and .93 (weighted). Furthermore, we could extract and interpret the patterns learned by one of our models besides quantifying how those patterns relate to the classification task. The interpretability step is important among machine learning legal applications and gives us an exciting insight into how black-box models make decisions.
Analysing similarities between legal court documents using natural language processing approaches based on Transformers
TRT5 - Regional Labour Court of the 5th Region（第五地区地区劳工法院）；SENAI CIMATEC University Center（SENAI CIMATEC大学中心）；Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI（萨里以人为本人工智能研究所）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
Legal proceedings take plenty of time and also cost a lot. The lawyers have to do a lot of work in order to identify the different sections of prior cases and statutes. The paper tries to solve the first tasks in AILA2021 (Artificial Intelligence for Legal Assistance) that will be held in FIRE2021 (Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation). The task is to semantically segment the document into different assigned one of the 7 predefined labels or "rhetorical roles." The paper uses BERT to obtain the sentence embeddings from a sentence, and then a linear classifier is used to output the final …
LexNLP is an open source Python package focused on natural language processing and machine learning for legal and regulatory text. The package includes functionality to (i) segment documents, (ii) identify key text such as titles and section headings, (iii) extract over eighteen types of structured information like distances and dates, (iv) extract named entities such as companies and geopolitical entities, (v) transform text into features for model training, and (vi) build unsupervised and supervised models such as word embedding or tagging models. LexNLP includes pre-trained models based on …
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
A law practitioner has to go through a lot of long legal case proceedings. To understand the motivation behind the actions of different parties/individuals in a legal case, it is essential that the parts of the document that express an intent corresponding to the case be clearly understood. In this paper, we introduce a dataset of 93 legal documents, belonging to the case categories of either Murder, Land Dispute, Robbery, or Corruption, where phrases expressing intent same as the category of the document are annotated. Also, we annotate fine-grained intents for each such phrase to enable a de…
Legal judgment prediction (LJP) applies Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to predict judgment results based on fact descriptions automatically. Recently, large-scale public datasets and advances in NLP research have led to increasing interest in LJP. Despite a clear gap between machine and human performance, impressive results have been achieved in various benchmark datasets. In this paper, to address the current lack of comprehensive survey of existing LJP tasks, datasets, models and evaluations, (1) we analyze 31 LJP datasets in 6 languages, present their construction process and …
Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences)（齐鲁工业大学（山东省科学院））；Shandong University（山东大学）；Shandong University of Finance and Economics（山东财经大学）
Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) aims to automatically predict judgment results, such as charges, relevant law articles, and the term of penalty. It plays a vital role in legal assistant systems and has become a popular research topic in recent years. This paper concerns a worthwhile but not well-studied LJP task, Appeal judgment Prediction (AJP), which predicts the judgment of an appellate court on an appeal case based on the textual description of case facts and grounds of appeal. There are two significant challenges in practice to solve the AJP task. One is how to model the appeal judgment p…
