Complex Labelling and Similarity Prediction in Legal Texts: Automatic Analysis of France’s Court of Cassation Rulings

Thibault Charmet, Inès Cherichi, Matthieu Allain, Urszula Czerwinska, Amaury Fouret, Benoît Sagot, Rachel Bawden


Abstract
Detecting divergences in the applications of the law (where the same legal text is applied differently by two rulings) is an important task. It is the mission of the French Cour de Cassation. The first step in the detection of divergences is to detect similar cases, which is currently done manually by experts. They rely on summarised versions of the rulings (syntheses and keyword sequences), which are currently produced manually and are not available for all rulings. There is also a high degree of variability in the keyword choices and the level of granularity used. In this article, we therefore aim to provide automatic tools to facilitate the search for similar rulings. We do this by (i) providing automatic keyword sequence generation models, which can be used to improve the coverage of the analysis, and (ii) providing measures of similarity based on the available texts and augmented with predicted keyword sequences. Our experiments show that the predictions improve correlations of automatically obtained similarities against our specially colelcted human judgments of similarity.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.509
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
4754–4766
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.509
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thibault Charmet, Inès Cherichi, Matthieu Allain, Urszula Czerwinska, Amaury Fouret, Benoît Sagot, and Rachel Bawden. 2022. Complex Labelling and Similarity Prediction in Legal Texts: Automatic Analysis of France’s Court of Cassation Rulings. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4754–4766, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Complex Labelling and Similarity Prediction in Legal Texts: Automatic Analysis of France’s Court of Cassation Rulings (Charmet et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.509.pdf
Code
 rbawden/similarity-cour-de-cassation