Improving Legal Information Retrieval: Metadata Extraction and Segmentation of German Court Rulings

Ingo Glaser, Sebastian Moser, Florian Matthes

2021

Abstract

Legal research is a vital part of the work of lawyers. The increasing complexity of legal cases has led to a desire for fast and accurate legal information retrieval, leveraging semantic information. However, two main problems occur on that path. First, the share of published judgments is only marginal. Second, it lacks state-of-the-art NLP approaches to extract semantic information. The latter, in turn, can be attributed to the issue of data scarcity. One big issue in the publication process of court rulings is the lack of automatization. Yet, the digitalization of court rulings, specifically transforming the textual representation from the court into a machine-readable format, is mainly done manually. To address this issue, we propose an automated pipeline to segment court rulings and extract metadata. We integrate that pipeline into a prototypical web application and use it for a qualitative evaluation. The results show that the extraction of metadata and the classification of paragraphs into the respective verdict segments perform well and can be utilized within the existing processes at legal publishers.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Glaser I., Moser S. and Matthes F. (2021). Improving Legal Information Retrieval: Metadata Extraction and Segmentation of German Court Rulings. In Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2021) - Volume 1: KDIR; ISBN 978-989-758-533-3, SciTePress, pages 282-291. DOI: 10.5220/0010691300003064

in Bibtex Style

@conference{kdir21,
author={Ingo Glaser and Sebastian Moser and Florian Matthes},
title={Improving Legal Information Retrieval: Metadata Extraction and Segmentation of German Court Rulings},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2021) - Volume 1: KDIR},
year={2021},
pages={282-291},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010691300003064},
isbn={978-989-758-533-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2021) - Volume 1: KDIR
TI - Improving Legal Information Retrieval: Metadata Extraction and Segmentation of German Court Rulings
SN - 978-989-758-533-3
AU - Glaser I.
AU - Moser S.
AU - Matthes F.
PY - 2021
SP - 282
EP - 291
DO - 10.5220/0010691300003064
PB - SciTePress