Japanese legal term correction using random forest

Abstract

We propose a method that assists legislation drafters in finding inappropriate use of Japanese legal terms and their corrections from Japanese statutory sentences. In particular, we focus on sets of similar legal terms whose usages are strictly defined in legislation drafting rules that have been established over the years. In this paper, we first define input and output of legal term correction task. We regard it as a special case of sentence completion test with multiple choices. Next, we describe a legal term correction method for Japanese statutory sentences. Our method predicts suitable legal terms using Random Forest classifiers. The classifiers in our method use adjacent words to a target legal term as input features, and are optimized in various parameters including the number of adjacent words to be used for each legal term set. We conduct an experiment using actual statutory sentences from 3,983 existing acts and cabinet orders that consist of approximately 47M words in total. As for legal term sets, we pick 27 sets from legislation drafting manuals. The experimental result shows that our method outperformed existing modern word prediction methods using neural language models and that each Random Forest classifier utilizes characteristics of its corresponding legal term set.