Legal (Natural) Language Processing (NLP) Task
A Legal (Natural) Language Processing (NLP) Task is a domain-specific NLP task that is a legal AI task (which specializes in interpreting and analyzing legal language and documents).
- AKA: Legal NLP Task, Legal Language Processing.
- Context:
- Task Input: legal documents, legal texts, case law, contracts
- Task Output: legal analysis, legal insights, legal recommendations
- Task Performance Measure: legal accuracy, legal compliance, legal relevance
- ...
- It is a domain-specific NLP task for legal documents.
- It applies natural language processing (NLP) techniques to legal documents and texts to automate, analyze, and extract information, thereby improving efficiency and accuracy in legal tasks.
- It can (typically) be used for tasks such as legal research, document drafting, contract analysis, and predictive analytics.
- It can (often) help lawyers by automating the extraction and processing of information from unstructured text, making the legal processes faster and more reliable.
- It can be integrated into legal technology tools to enhance capabilities like entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and document classification, ensuring compliance and consistency across legal documents.
- It can range from being a Legal Document Analysis Task to being a Legal Document Generation Task, depending on its processing type.
- It can range from being a Single-Jurisdiction Task to being a Multi-Jurisdiction Task, depending on its legal scope.
- ...
- Example(s):
- Legal Document Processing Tasks, such as:
- Legal Analysis Tasks, such as:
- Legal Document Review Tasks, such as legal contract review, legal compliance checking, legal due diligence, and legal risk assessment.
- Legal Information Extraction Tasks, such as legal entity extraction, legal provision identification, legal obligation extraction, and legal term analysis.
- Legal Document Classification Tasks, such as legal case categorization, legal document typing, legal relevance assessment, and legal priority sorting.
- Legal Generation Tasks, such as:
- Legal Document Creation Tasks, such as legal contract drafting, legal brief generation, legal response preparation, and legal report creation.
- Legal Content Summarization Tasks, such as legal case summary, legal document abstract, legal provision summary, and legal judgment summary.
- Legal Advisory Generation Tasks, such as legal advice generation, legal compliance guidance, legal risk notification, and legal action recommendation.
- Legal Research Tasks, such as:
- Legal Case Analysis Tasks, such as legal precedent search, legal case comparison, legal outcome prediction, and legal pattern identification.
- Legal Statute Analysis Tasks, such as legal regulation interpretation, legal compliance analysis, legal requirement extraction, and legal update tracking.
- Legal Citation Analysis Tasks, such as legal reference validation, legal authority checking, legal source verification, and legal citation network analysis.
- Legal Analysis Tasks, such as:
- Legal Language Understanding Tasks, such as:
- Legal Semantic Analysis Tasks, such as:
- Legal Entity Recognition Tasks, such as legal entity extraction, legal party identification, legal role classification, and legal relationship mapping.
- Legal Topic Analysis Tasks, such as legal topic modeling, legal issue identification, legal argument detection, and legal clause classification.
- Legal Sentiment Analysis Tasks, such as legal opinion analysis, legal judgment tone, legal decision sentiment, and legal intent recognition.
- Legal Semantic Analysis Tasks, such as:
- Legal Language Application Tasks, such as:
- Legal Compliance Tasks, such as:
- Legal Regulatory Analysis Tasks, such as legal compliance monitoring, legal violation detection, legal requirement tracking, and legal standard verification.
- Legal Contract Analysis Tasks, such as legal clause analysis, legal term validation, legal obligation tracking, and legal risk identification.
- Legal Policy Analysis Tasks, such as legal policy interpretation, legal guideline verification, legal procedure validation, and legal standard compliance.
- Legal Compliance Tasks, such as:
- Legal System Implementations, such as:
- Legal Commercial Systems, such as:
- ...
- ...
- Legal Document Processing Tasks, such as:
- Counter-Example(s):
- General NLP Tasks, which lack legal domain knowledge.
- Medical NLP Tasks, which focus on medical terminology rather than legal language.
- Financial NLP Tasks, which process financial documents instead of legal texts.
- Multi-Modal NLP Tasks, which incorporate non-textual data beyond legal text.
- See: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Text Mining, Contract Drafting Automation, Legal Document Assembly, Smart Contracts, Legal Document Corpus.
References
2024
- (Watson et al., 2024) ⇒ William Watson, Nicole Cho, Nishan Srishankar, Zhen Zeng, Lucas Cecchi, Daniel Scott, Suchetha Siddagangappa, Rachneet Kaur, Tucker Balch, and Manuela Veloso. (2024). “LAW: Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts.” In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.11063.
- NOTES:
- The paper introduces LAW, a modular AI framework designed to handle custody and fund services contracts by leveraging domain-specific tools and text agents.
- The paper introduces text agents like the Summary Agent and Comparison Agent to analyze and condense information from lengthy legal documents.
- The paper discusses how LAW utilizes modular workflows to address the challenges of long and unstructured legal texts, splitting and processing content into manageable chunks.
- NOTES:
2024
- (ChatGPT-OpenAI, 2024) ⇒ Prompt: Summarize the concept Legal (Natural) Language Processing in 1- 2 paragraphs. ChatGPT (model:gpt-4o). Retrieved: 2024-08-03.
- QUOTE: Legal (Natural) Language Processing (Legal NLP) is a specialized branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP) focused on understanding, interpreting, and generating human language specifically within the legal domain. This interdisciplinary field combines elements of law, linguistics, and computer science to develop algorithms and models capable of processing legal texts such as statutes, case law, contracts, and other legal documents. The primary goal is to automate and enhance various legal tasks, including document review, contract analysis, legal research, and compliance monitoring, thereby increasing efficiency, reducing errors, and lowering costs in the legal industry.
Legal NLP leverages advanced techniques in machine learning and artificial intelligence to handle the complex and nuanced language typical of legal texts. These techniques include named entity recognition (NER) to identify and categorize legal concepts, dependency parsing to understand syntactic and semantic relationships, and sentiment analysis to gauge the tone or intent of legal opinions. By training models on large datasets of legal documents, Legal NLP tools can accomplish tasks like extracting relevant information, summarizing lengthy documents, predicting case outcomes, and even generating legal drafts. Despite its transformative potential, Legal NLP faces challenges such as ensuring data privacy, handling jurisdiction-specific variations, and maintaining the high accuracy required in legal contexts.
- QUOTE: Legal (Natural) Language Processing (Legal NLP) is a specialized branch of Natural Language Processing (NLP) focused on understanding, interpreting, and generating human language specifically within the legal domain. This interdisciplinary field combines elements of law, linguistics, and computer science to develop algorithms and models capable of processing legal texts such as statutes, case law, contracts, and other legal documents. The primary goal is to automate and enhance various legal tasks, including document review, contract analysis, legal research, and compliance monitoring, thereby increasing efficiency, reducing errors, and lowering costs in the legal industry.
2023a
- (Frankenreiter & Nyarko, 2023) ⇒ Jens Frankenreiter, and Julian Nyarko (2023). "Natural Language Processing in Legal Tech". In: Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice 70 (David Freeman Engstrom ed., 2023), [ISBN:9781009255332, 1009255339 https://daemen.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1350093710].
- QUOTE: The legal system trades in words, and NLP promises to automate an activity that lies at the heart of many tasks performed by lawyers: the extraction and processing of information from unstructured text. Lawyers routinely encounter unstructured text in their daily work routine, be it in the form of judicial opinions, statutes, legal briefs, written agreements, or witness testimony. Understanding and processing the information from this text is essential for them to be effective. For example, without reading prior case law, lawyers will generally be unable to determine whether a case at hand has a chance of succeeding in court. Consequently, many legal tech applications, and particularly those seeking to automate the tasks lying at the heart of what it means to “be a lawyer,” depend on NLP to process such information in a meaningful way.
2023b
- (Fei, Shen et al., 2023) ⇒ Zhiwei Fei, Xiaoyu Shen, Dawei Zhu, Fengzhe Zhou, Zhuo Han, Songyang Zhang, Kai Chen, Zongwen Shen, and Jidong Ge. (2023). “LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models.” In: arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.16289. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2309.16289
- QUOTE:
Cognitive Level | ID | Task | Data Source | Metric | Type |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Legal Knowledge Memorization | 1-1 | Article Recitation | FLK | Rouge-L | Generation |
1-2 | Knowledge Question Answering | JEC_QA | Accuracy | SLC | |
2-1 | Document Proofreading | CAIL2022 | F0.5 | Generation | |
2-2 | Dispute Focus Identification | LAIC2021 | F1 | MLC | |
2-3 | Marital Disputes Identification | AIStudio | F1 | MLC | |
Legal Knowledge Understanding | 2-4 | Issue Topic Identification Reading Comprehension | CrimeKgAssitant CAIL2019 | Accuracy rc-F1 | SLC |
2-5 | Reading Comprehension | CAIL2019 | rc-F1 | Extraction | |
2-6 | Named-Entity Recognition | CAIL2022 | soft-F1 | Extraction | |
2-7 | Opinion Summarization | CAIL2021 | Rouge-L | Generation | |
2-8 | Argument Mining | CAIL2022 | Accuracy | SLC | |
2-9 | Event Detection | LEVEN | F1 | MLC | |
2-10 | Trigger Word Extraction | LEVEN | soft-F1 | Extraction | |
3-1 | Fact-based Article Prediction | CAIL2018 | F1 | MLC | |
3-2 | Scene-based Article Prediction | LawGPT | Rouge-L | Generation | |
3-3 | Charge Prediction | CAIL2018 | F1 | MLC | |
Legal Knowledge Applying | 3-4 | Prison Term Prediction w.o. Article | CAIL2018 | nLog-distance | Regression |
3-5 | Prison Term Prediction w. Article | CAIL2018 | nLog-distance | Regression | |
3-6 | Case Analysis | JEC_QA | Accuracy | SLC | |
3-7 | Criminal Damages Calculation | LAIC2021 | Accuracy | Regression | |
3-8 | Consultation | hualv.com | Rouge-L | Generation |
2022
- (Song et al., 2022) ⇒ Dezhao Song, Sally Gao, Baosheng He, and Frank Schilder. (2022). “On the Effectiveness of Pre-trained Language Models for Legal Natural Language Processing: An Empirical Study.” In: IEEE Access, 10. doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3190408
- QUOTE: ... We present the first comprehensive empirical evaluation of pre-trained language models (PLMs) for legal natural language processing (NLP) in order to examine their effectiveness in this domain. ...
2021
- (Flynn, 2021) ⇒ Shannon Flynn (2021). "How Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI Is Used in Law". In: American Bar Association - Law Technology Today (2021).
- QUOTE:Legal work is rarely straightforward, which can be frustrating for both lawyers and their clients. AI tools like natural language processing can help streamline and improve legal work, ensuring better outcomes for everyone involved.
The legal sector’s dependence on precise language makes it the ideal place to utilize NLP. While this concept is still in its early stages, it’s already showing tremendous potential for lawyers and their clients.
- QUOTE:Legal work is rarely straightforward, which can be frustrating for both lawyers and their clients. AI tools like natural language processing can help streamline and improve legal work, ensuring better outcomes for everyone involved.
2020
- (Chalkidis et al., 2020) ⇒ Ilias Chalkidis, Manos Fergadiotis, Prodromos Malakasiotis, Nikolaos Aletras, and Ion Androutsopoulos. (2020). “LEGAL-BERT: The Muppets Straight Out of Law School.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.02559 DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2010.02559.
- ABSTRACT: BERT has achieved impressive performance in several NLP tasks. However, there has been limited investigation on its adaptation guidelines in specialised domains. Here we focus on the legal domain, where we explore several approaches for applying BERT models to downstream legal tasks, evaluating on multiple datasets. Our findings indicate that the previous guidelines for pre-training and fine-tuning, often blindly followed, do not always generalize well in the legal domain. Thus we propose a systematic investigation of the available strategies when applying BERT in specialised domains. These are: (a) use the original BERT out of the box, (b) adapt BERT by additional pre-training on domain-specific corpora, and (c) pre-train BERT from scratch on domain-specific corpora. We also propose a broader hyper-parameter search space when fine-tuning for downstream tasks and we release LEGAL-BERT, a family of BERT models intended to assist legal NLP research, computational law, and legal technology applications.