Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

8-2018

Abstract

LawStats provides quantitative insights into court decisions from the Bundesgerichtshof - Federal Court of Justice (BGH), the Federal Court of Justice in Germany. Using Watson Web Services and approaches from Sentiment Analysis (SA), we can automatically classify the revision outcome and offer statistics on judges, senates, previous instances etc. via faceted search. These statistics are accessible through a open web interface to aid law professionals. With a clear focus on interpretability, users can not only explore statistics, but can also understand, which sentences in the decision are responsible for the machine’s decision; links to the original texts provide more context. This is the first large-scale application of Machine Learning (ML) based Natural Language Processing (NLP) for German in the analysis of ordinary court decisions in Germany that we are aware of. We have analyzed over 50,000 court decisions and extracted the outcomes and relevant entities. The modular architecture of the application allows continuous improvements of the ML model as more annotations become available over time. The tool can provide a critical foundation for further quantitative research in the legal domain and can be used as a proof-of-concept for similar efforts.

Keywords

Cognitive services, Faceted search, Law domain, Text classification, Web APIs

Discipline

Internet Law | Science and Technology Law

Research Areas

Innovation, Technology and the Law

Publication

Proceedingsof the Second IFIP TC 5, TC 8/WG 8.4, 8.9, TC 12/WG 12.9 International Cross-Domain Conference, CD-MAKE 2018, Hamburg, Germany, August 27-30

First Page

212

Last Page

222

ISBN

9783319997391

Identifier

10.1007/978-3-319-99740-7_14

Publisher

Springer

City or Country

Cham

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99740-7_14

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