Artificial Intelligence for Reading Legal Cases Model Developed by IIT Kharagpur
The technology aims at reducing human intervention and provide legal assistance to the common man.
IIT Kharagpur researchers have come up with an artificial intelligence technology to assist in reading the legal case judgements. A team constituting of members from the Engineering department and Computer Science department of IIT Kharagpur have come up with two deep neural models to crack the rhetorical meaning of the sentences used in legal case judgements. This technology, if used for the purpose for which it is built, will be a monumentous occasion for the legal field in India.
In a country where a Common Law System is used and priority is given to the doctrine of legal precedent over statutory law and legal documents are often written in an unstructured way, the use of artificial intelligence will be most welcome.
The lead researcher, Professor Saptarshi Ghosh said that the neural methods will substantially reduce human intervention and prove its usefulness across multiple legal domains. The method can be of great help in several downstream tasks like case law analysis, legal search, legal judgements and similar other tasks.
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Artificial Intelligence is extensively used in countries like Australia, Singapore, Japan, Britain and the United States to perform various tasks like predicting the outcome of cases, reviewing documents during conduct due diligence and litigation, performing legal research etc.
The research team comprises of eminent researchers like Dr Adam Wyner of UK’s Swansea University, Kripabandhu Ghosh of Tata Research Development and Design Centre, Pune and research scholars like Shounak Paul and Paheli Bhattacharya. Ghosh also emphasised on the fact that the purpose of the technology is to provide legal assistance to the common man.
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Government of India’s Science and Engineering Research Board of the Department of Science and Technology under the project - NYAYA is currently supporting the project. At JURIX International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems in 2019, a research paper on the same was bestowed with the “Best Paper Award” as well.