Interactive Natural Language Processing for Legal Text

Update: We received the best student paper award for our paper at JURIX’15!

In an earlier post, I talked about my work on Natural Language Processing in the clinical domain. The main idea behind the project is to enable domain experts to build machine learning models for analyzing text. We do this by designing usable tools for NLP without really having the need to send datasets to machine learning experts or understanding the inner working details of the algorithms. The post also features a demo video of the prototype tool that we have built.

I was presenting this work at my program’s bi-weekly meetings where Jaromir, a fellow ISP graduate student, pointed out that such an approach could be useful for his work as well. Jaromir also holds a degree in Law and works on building AI systems for legal applications. As a result, we ended up collaborating on a project on using the approach for statutory analysis. While, the main topic of discussion in the project is on the framework in which a human experts cooperate with a machine learning text classification algorithm, we also ended up augmenting our approach with a new way of capturing and re-using knowledge. In our tool datasets and models are treated separately and our not tied together. So, if you were building a classification model for say statutes from the state of Alaska, when you need to analyze laws from Kansas you need not start from scratch. This allows us to be in a better starting place in terms of all the performance measures and build a model using fewer training examples.

The results of the cold start (Kansas) and the knowledge re-use (Alaska) experiment. In the Figure KS stands for Kansas, AK for Alaska, 1p and 2p for the first (ML model-oriented) and second (interaction-oriented) evaluation perspectives, P for precision, R for recall, F1 for F1 measure, and ROC with a number for an ROC curve of the ML classifier trained on the specified number of documents.
The results of the cold start (Kansas) and the knowledge re-use (Alaska) experiment. In the Figure KS stands for Kansas, AK for Alaska, P for precision, R for recall, F1 for F1 measure, and ROC with a number for an ROC curve of the ML classifier trained on the specified number of documents.

We will be presenting this work at JURIX’15 during the 28th year of the conference focusing on legal information systems. Previously, we had presented portions of this work at the AMIA Summit on Clinical Research Informatics and at the ACM IUI Workshop on Visual Text Analytics.

References

Jaromír Šavelka, Gaurav Trivedi, and Kevin Ashley. 2015. Applying an Interactive Machine Learning Approach to Statutory Analysis. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX ’15). Braga, Portugal. [PDF] – Awarded the Best Student Paper (Top 0.01%).

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