Deep semantic interpretations of legal texts

Abstract

One of the main obstacles to progress in the field of artificial intelligence and law is the natural language barrier, but the technology of natural language processing has advanced recently. In this paper, we will show that a state-of-the-art statistical parser can handle even the complex syntactic constructions of an appellate court judge, and that a deep semantic interpretation of the full text of a judicial opinion can be computed automatically from the output of the parser. Our ultimate goal is to use this semantic interpretation to extract from a judicial opinion precisely the information that a lawyer wants to know about a case. Copyright 2007 ACM.