Event extraction for legal case building and reasoning

Abstract

We are interested in developing tools to support the activities of lawyers in corporate litigation. In current applications, information such as characters that have played a significant role in a case, events in which they have participated, people they have been in contact, etc., have to be manually identified. There is little in the way of support to help them identify the relevant information in the first place. In this paper, we describe an approach to semi-automatically extracting such information from the collection of documents the lawyers are searching. Our approach is based on Natural Language Processing techniques and it enables the use of entity related information corresponding to the relations among the key players of a case, extracted in the form of events. © 2010 IFIP.