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Automatic semantic edge labeling over legal citation graphs

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Abstract

A large number of cross-references to various bodies of text are used in legal texts, each serving a different purpose. It is often necessary for authorities and companies to look into certain types of these citations. Yet, there is a lack of automatic tools to aid in this process. Recently, citation graphs have been used to improve the intelligibility of complex rule frameworks. We propose an algorithm that builds the citation graph from a document and automatically labels each edge according to its purpose. Our method uses the citing text only and thus works only on citations who’s purpose can be uniquely identified by their surrounding text. This framework is then applied to the US code. This paper includes defining and evaluating a standard gold set of labels that cover a vast majority of citation types which appear in the “US Code” but are still short enough for practical use. We also proposed a novel linear-chain conditional random field model that extracts the features required for labeling the citations from the surrounding text. We then analyzed the effectiveness of different clustering methods such as K-means and support vector machine to automatically label each citation with the corresponding label. Besides this, we talk about the practical difficulties of this task and give a comparison of human accuracy compared to our end-to-end algorithm.

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Notes

  1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text.

  2. This dataset was also obtained during the annotation process, but lacked a semantic label for the citations. This reduces the chances of over fitting because the predicate extraction is learned on a different dataset than the dataset used for training the label classifier.

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Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feed back, which helped us improve this manuscript. In addition the authors would like to thank Vironica I Brown, Roman Diveev, Max Goldstein, Eva L Lauer, Nicholas W Long, Paul J Punzone and Joseph M Ragukonis for their contributions in the annotation process. We would also like to thank Benjamin Grider for his help in designing the graphical user interface for our system.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Ali Sadeghian, Laksshman Sundaram, Daisy Zhe Wang & William F. Hamilton

  2. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Laksshman Sundaram

  3. MITRE Corp., McLean, VA, USA

    Karl Branting & Craig Pfeifer

Authors
  1. Ali Sadeghian
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  2. Laksshman Sundaram
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  3. Daisy Zhe Wang
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  4. William F. Hamilton
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  5. Karl Branting
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  6. Craig Pfeifer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ali Sadeghian.

Additional information

This work is partially supported by UF CISE Data Science Research Lab, UF Law School and ICAIR Program.

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Sadeghian, A., Sundaram, L., Wang, D.Z. et al. Automatic semantic edge labeling over legal citation graphs. Artif Intell Law 26, 127–144 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-018-9217-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-018-9217-1

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