Legal document recommendation system: a dictionary based approach

Abstract

Purpose

In the Indian judicial system, the court considers interpretations of similar previous judgments for the present case. An essential requirement of legal practitioners is to determine the most relevant judgments from an enormous amount of judgments for preparing supportive, beneficial and favorable arguments against the opponent. It urges a strong demand to develop a Legal Document Recommendation System (LDRS) to automate the process. In existing works, traditionally preprocessed judgment corpus is processed by Doc2Vec to learn semantically rich judgment embedding space (i.e. vector space). Here, vectors of semantically relevant judgments are in close proximity, as Doc2Vec can effectively capture semantic meanings. The enormous amount of judgments produces a huge noisy corpus and vocabulary which possesses a significant challenge: traditional preprocessing cannot fully eliminate noisy data from the corpus and due to this, the Doc2Vec demands huge memory and time to learn the judgment embedding. It also adversely affects the recommendation performance in terms of correctness. This paper aims to develop an effective and efficient LDRS to support civilians and the legal fraternity.

Design/methodology/approach

To overcome previously mentioned challenges, this research proposes the LDRS that uses the proposed Generalized English and Indian Legal Dictionary (GEILD) which keeps the corpus of relevant dictionary words only and discards noisy elements. Accordingly, the proposed LDRS significantly reduces the corpus size, which can potentially improve the space and time efficiency of Doc2Vec.

Findings

The experimental results confirm that the proposed LDRS with GEILD yield superior performance in terms of accuracy, F1-Score, MCC-Score, with significant improvement in the space and time efficiency.

Originality/value

The proposed LDRS uses the customized domain-specific preprocessing and novel legal dictionary (i.e. GEILD) to precisely recommend the relevant judgments. The proposed LDRS can be incorporated with online legal search repositories/engines to enrich their functionality.

Citation

Dhanani, J., Mehta, R. and Rana, D.P. (2021), "Legal document recommendation system: a dictionary based approach", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 187-203. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWIS-02-2021-0015