Legal Judgement Prediction with NLP

22^nd November 2019, 13:00 H223
Dr. Nikolaos Aletras
Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield

Abstract

Legal judgment prediction is the task of automatically predicting the outcome of a court case, given a text describing the case’s facts. In this talk, I will describe work on legal judgement prediction on the European Court of Human Rights using various neural network architectures in a variety of tasks: (1) binary violation classification; (2) multi-label classification; (3) case importance prediction. I will also talk about our findings on model biases towards demographic information.

Bio:

I'm a Lecturer in Natural Language Processing in the Computer Science Department of the University of Sheffield, co-affiliated with the Machine Learning (ML) group. Previously, I was a Lecturer in Data Science at the Information School, University of Sheffield. I've gained industrial experience working as a scientist at Amazon (Amazon Research Cambridge and Alexa). I was a research associate at UCL, Department of Computer Science, Media Futures Group. My research interests are in NLP, Machine Learning and Data Science. I develop text analysis methods to solve problems in other scientific areas such as (computational) social and legal science. I'm also interested in applying statistical methods for detecting and interpreting the underlying topics in large volumes of text data.