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Extracting Legal Propositions from Appellate Decisions with Text Discourse Analysis Methods

  • Conference paper
On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2004: OTM 2004 Workshops (OTM 2004)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 3292))

Abstract

Appellate decisions are the most important judicial documents in the Anglo-American legal system. Typically, judges write appellate opinions by including a summary of the facts of the case, identification of the issues of law raised in arguments by counsel for each of the parties, pronouncement of the legal propositions supported by the controlling authorities, and declaration of a decision that resolves the issues by applying the legal propositions to the facts of the case. The cited legal propositions are often concise summaries of certain aspects of previous cases or federal or state codes, which are applicable to the particular case in consideration. In this paper, we describe how a text discourse analysis program can be used to categorize each sentence in the appellate decisions as one or more of the discourse categories such as ‘facts’, ‘issues’, ‘legal propositions’, and/or ‘decisions’. We also show how an information extraction program is applied to the sentences belonging to the ‘legal proposition’ category to build a visually browsable legal knowledge base. We expect the browsable knowledge base to aid both counsels and judges finding supporting legal propositions for their arguments during the early stage of preparing court briefs or the appellate decisions.

This work was supported by the faculty research fund of Konkuk University in 2004.

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Paik, W., Lee, J.Y. (2004). Extracting Legal Propositions from Appellate Decisions with Text Discourse Analysis Methods. In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z., Corsaro, A. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2004: OTM 2004 Workshops. OTM 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3292. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30470-8_74

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30470-8_74

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23664-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-30470-8

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