Judgment Tagging and Recommendation Using Pre-Trained Language Models and Legal Taxonomy

Abstract

<p>We study the problem of machine comprehension of court judgments and generation of descriptive tags for judgments. Our approach makes use of a legal taxonomy D, which serves as a dictionary of canonicalized legal concepts. Given a court judgment J, our method identifies the key contents of J and then applies Word2Vec and BERT-based models to select a short list T_J of terms/phrases from the taxonomy D as descriptive tags of J. The tag set T_J suggests concepts that are relevant to or associative with J and provides a simple mechanism for readers of J to compose associative queries for effective judgment recommendation. Our prototype system implemented on the Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII) platform shows that our method provides a highly effective tool that assists users in exploring a judgment corpus and in obtaining relevant judgment recommendation.<br></p>