IIT Kharagpur develops AI system to read legal judgments
Posted on 22 January 2020
IIT Kharagpur researchers have evolved an Artificial Intelligence-aided method to read legal judgments, which can not only tell which laws are getting violated but also in the process help minimize legal costs.
A team of researchers at the premier engineering institute’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering used a novel method to automate the reading of a legal document by using a more evolved Machine Learning technique. Instead of the usual ‘Conditional Random Fields’ that use handcrafted features to train the machine, they have used two deep neural models to understand the rhetorical roles of sentences in a legal case judgment.
Automatically understanding the role of sentences in a legal case judgment is important as it can help in several downstream tasks such as summarization of legal judgments, legal search, case law analysis and other functions.
Globally, in countries such as US, Britain, Japan, Singapore and Australia, Artificial Intelligence is being used to perform legal research, review documents during litigation and conduct due diligence, analyse contracts to determine whether they meet pre-determined criteria and to even predict outcomes. However, AI is yet to sufficiently penetrate the legal field in India.