Semantic Search and Summarization of Judgments Using Topic Modeling

Tien Hsuan Wu, Ben Kao, Felix Chan, Anne S.Y. Cheung, Michael M.K. Cheung, Guowen Yuan, Yongxi Chen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Online legal document libraries, such as WorldLII, are indispensable tools for legal professionals to conduct legal research. We study how topic modeling techniques can be applied to such platforms to facilitate searching of court judgments. Specifically, we improve search effectiveness by matching judgments to queries at semantics level rather than at keyword level. Also, we design a system that summarizes a retrieved judgment by highlighting a small number of paragraphs that are semantically most relevant to the user query. This summary serves two purposes: (1) It explains to the user why the machine finds the retrieved judgment relevant to the user's query, and (2) it helps the user quickly grasp the most salient points of the judgment, which significantly reduces the amount of time needed by the user to go through the returned search results. We further enhance our system by integrating domain knowledge provided by legal experts. The knowledge includes the features and aspects that are most important for a given category of judgments. Users can then view a judgement's summary focusing on particular aspects only. We illustrate the effectiveness of our techniques with a user evaluation experiment on the HKLII platform. The results show that our methods are highly effective.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLegal Knowledge and Information Systems
Subtitle of host publicationJURIX 2021 - The 34th Annual Conference, Vilnius, Lithuania, 8-10 December 2021
EditorsErich Schweighofer
Place of PublicationAmsterdam
PublisherIOS Press BV
Pages100-106
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-64368-253-2
ISBN (Print)978-1-64368-252-5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Dec 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event34th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, JURIX 2021 - Vilnus, Lithuania
Duration: 8 Dec 202110 Dec 2021
https://ebooks.iospress.nl/volume/legal-knowledge-and-information-systems-jurix-2021-the-thirty-fourth-annual-conference-vilnius-lithuania-810-december-2021

Publication series

NameFrontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
PublisherIOS Press
Volume346
ISSN (Print)0922-6389
ISSN (Electronic)1879-8314

Conference

Conference34th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, JURIX 2021
Abbreviated titleJURIX 2021
Country/TerritoryLithuania
CityVilnus
Period8/12/2110/12/21
OtherTraditionally concerned with computational models of legal reasoning and the analysis of legal data, the field of legal knowledge and information systems has seen increasing interest in the application of data analytics and machine learning tools to legal tasks in recent years.

This book presents the proceedings of the 34th annual JURIX conference, which, due to pandemic restrictions, was hosted online in a virtual format from 8 – 10 December 2021 in Vilnius, Lithuania. Since its inception as a mainly Dutch event, the JURIX conference has become truly international and now, as a platform for the exchange of knowledge between theoretical research and applications, attracts academics, legal practitioners, software companies, governmental agencies and judiciary from around the world. A total of 65 submissions were received for this edition, and after rigorous review, 30 of these were selected for publication as long papers or short papers, representing an overall acceptance rate of 46 %. The papers are divided into 6 sections: Visualization and Legal Informatics; Knowledge Representation and Data Analytics; Logical and Conceptual Representations; Predictive Models; Explainable Artificial Intelligence; and Legal Ethics, and cover a wide range of topics, from computational models of legal argumentation, case-based reasoning, legal ontologies, smart contracts, privacy management and evidential reasoning, through information extraction from different types of text in legal documents, to ethical dilemmas.

Providing an overview of recent advances and the cross-fertilization between law and computing technologies, this book will be of interest to all those working at the interface between technology and law.
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