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CASRank: A ranking algorithm for legal statute retrieval

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Abstract

Unlike the courts in western countries, legal documents of the Indian judiciary are unstructured, verbose, and noisy. In the justice system, statutes are written laws referred to by judges in support of judicial decisions. Retrieving relevant statutes for a given legal problem can be helpful to lawyers as well as the common man. Moreover, the dearth of publicly available annotated datasets of Indian legal documents limits the scope of legal analytics research. In this paper, we propose a ranking algorithm called CASRank to identify relevant statutes for a legal case query. We also develop a new dataset consisting of 858 Central Acts enacted by the Indian Parliament. Each Central Act is annotated with several attributes, like the act title, enactment date, act definition, chapters, sections, schedules, and footnotes. The first part of the experiment determines the best retrieval model suited for CASRank. The second set of experiments aims to identify the extent to which the attributes of the proposed Central Act dataset contribute towards the retrieval effectiveness of statutes. Experimental results show that the proposed approach obtains a MAP score of 0.0776 with a Precision@10 of 0.0420, showing a considerable increase in retrieval efficiency.

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Data Availability Statement

Central Act dataset [46] generated during this study has been deposited in the Zenodo repository. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5088102

Notes

  1. https://www.indiacode.nic.in/

  2. https://pypi.org/project/pdfminer.six/

  3. https://sites.google.com/view/fire-2019-aila/dataset-evaluation-plan?authuser=0

  4. https://github.com/mtkh0602/LegalSummarization

  5. www.liiofindia.org/in/cases/cen/INSC/

  6. https://trec.nist.gov/trec_eval/

  7. https://www.nltk.org/

  8. http://terrier.org/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

    Sakshi Parashar & Namita Mittal

  2. Parmonic AI, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Parth Mehta

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  1. Sakshi Parashar
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Correspondence to Sakshi Parashar.

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Parashar, S., Mittal, N. & Mehta, P. CASRank: A ranking algorithm for legal statute retrieval. Multimed Tools Appl 83, 5369–5386 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15464-0

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