Legal text analytics or how law meets Artificial Intelligence : opportunities and challenges

Published on 23/05/2018

On 23 May 2018, as part of its activities in Business Analytics and Regulatory Compliance, the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) hosted a keynote on advanced analytics and legal cognitive systems.

Professor Jorge Sanz and his team welcomed an eminence in Legal Informatics / Legal Analytics - Professor Kevin D. Ashley from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and Intelligent System Programme. He is one of the best know Professors in Law who has investigated computational reasoning and other Artificial Intelligence (AI) topics to the point of becoming a world-class interdisciplinary researcher in Legal Computing topics.

Developments in text analytics have led to new tools for legal practice. Legal text analytics involves automatically extracting semantic information from archives of case decisions, contracts, or statutes using linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques. This talk surveyed three text analytic techniques employed in currently available legal apps: the use of machine learning, network diagrams, and question answering. The presentation focused on how well text analytic techniques can answer legal questions given current limitations. By identifying argument-related information in legal texts, the new apps could automatically match documents’ concepts and argument roles with those required to solve the user’s legal problem. The extracted information could also enable AI models of legal reasoning and argument to connect directly with legal texts in making and explaining predictions.

Professor Ashley’s presentation was a source of inspiration for the participants. Dr. Marc Schiltz, Secretary General and Executive Head of the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) attended the keynote together with his colleagues, representatives of the University of Luxembourg, executives from the industry, as well as other directors and researchers from LIST. 

Share this page:

Contact

Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST)

5, avenue des Hauts-Fourneaux
L-4362 Esch-sur-Alzette

Send an e-mail