Skip to main content

Knowledge Acquisition for Categorization of Legal Case Reports

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7457))

Abstract

Natural language processing in complex domains, such as law, requires elaborate features, and their interaction is often difficult to model: thus traditional machine learning approaches might fail to perform satisfactorily. This paper describes our approach to assign categories and generate catchphrases for legal case reports. We describe our knowledge acquisition framework which lets us quickly build classification rules, using a small number of features, to assign general labels to cases. We show how the resulting knowledge base outperforms machine learning models which use both the designed features or a traditional bag of word representation. We also describe how to extend this approach to extract from the full text a list of more specific catchphrases that describe the content of the case.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Ashley, K.D., Brüninghaus, S.: Automatically classifying case texts and predicting outcomes. Artif. Intell. Law 17(2), 125–165 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Compton, P., Jansen, R.: Knowledge in context: a strategy for expert system maintenance. In: AI 1988: Proceedings of the Second Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 292–306. Springer, Adelaide (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Farzindar, A., Lapalme, G.: Letsum, an automatic legal text summarizing system. In: The Seventeenth Annual Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, JURIX 2004, p. 11. Ios Pr. Inc. (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Farzindar, A., Lapalme, G.: Machine Translation of Legal Information and Its Evaluation. In: Gao, Y., Japkowicz, N. (eds.) AI 2009. LNCS, vol. 5549, pp. 64–73. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Gaines, B.R., Compton, P.: Induction of ripple-down rules applied to modeling large databases. J. Intell. Inf. Syst. 5, 211–228 (1995)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Galgani, F., Compton, P., Hoffmann, A.: Combining different summarization techniques for legal text. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Innovative Hybrid Approaches to the Processing of Textual Data, pp. 115–123. Association for Computational Linguistics, Avignon (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Galgani, F., Compton, P., Hoffmann, A.: Towards Automatic Generation of Catchphrases for Legal Case Reports. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2012, Part II. LNCS, vol. 7182, pp. 414–425. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  8. Galgani, F., Hoffmann, A.: LEXA: Towards Automatic Legal Citation Classification. In: Li, J. (ed.) AI 2010. LNCS, vol. 6464, pp. 445–454. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Gonçalves, T., Quaresma, P.: Is linguistic information relevant for the text legal classification problem? In: ICAIL 2005, pp. 168–176 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Greenleaf, G., Mowbray, A., King, G., Van Dijk, P.: Public Access to Law via Internet: The Australian Legal Information Institute. Journal of Law and Information Science 6 49 (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Hachey, B., Grover, C.: Extractive summarisation of legal texts. Artif. Intell. Law 14(4), 305–345 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Kim, M.H., Compton, P., Kim, Y.S.: Rdr-based open ie for the web document. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Knowledge Capture, K-CAP 2011, pp. 105–112. ACM, New York (2011)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Krzywicki, A., Wobcke, W.: Incremental E-Mail Classification and Rule Suggestion Using Simple Term Statistics. In: Nicholson, A., Li, X. (eds.) AI 2009. LNCS, vol. 5866, pp. 250–259. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Lin, C.Y.: Rouge: A package for automatic evaluation of summaries. In: Text Summarization Branches Out: Proceedings of the ACL 2004 Workshop, pp. 74–81. Association for Computational Linguistics, Barcelona (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  15. de Maat, E., Krabben, K., Winkels, R.: Machine learning versus knowledge based classification of legal texts. In: Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, pp. 87–96. IOS Press, Amsterdam (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Moens, M.F.: Summarizing court decisions. Inf. Process. Manage. 43(6), 1748–1764 (2007)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  17. Sebastiani, F.: Machine learning in automated text categorization. ACM Comput. Surv. 34(1), 1–47 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Thompson, P.: Automatic categorization of case law. In: ICAIL 2001: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pp. 70–77. ACM, New York (2001)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Xu, H., Hoffmann, A.: RDRCE: Combining Machine Learning and Knowledge Acquisition. In: Kang, B.-H., Richards, D. (eds.) PKAW 2010. LNCS, vol. 6232, pp. 165–179. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Zhang, P., Koppaka, L.: Semantics-based legal citation network. In: ICAIL 2007: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, pp. 123–130. ACM Press, New York (2007)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Galgani, F., Compton, P., Hoffmann, A. (2012). Knowledge Acquisition for Categorization of Legal Case Reports. In: Richards, D., Kang, B.H. (eds) Knowledge Management and Acquisition for Intelligent Systems. PKAW 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7457. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32541-0_10

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32541-0_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32540-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32541-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics