Research Projects

People are overloaded by the vast amount of online information and documents, and it has become necessary to extract usable information from such collections. Legal documents are one example of this online information growth in law. Examples of these documents are constitutions, contracts, deeds, orders/judgments/decrees, pleadings, statutes, and wills. Given the alarming rise in crime, it is crucial to provide justice to the victims swiftly. The number of court cases is increasing in India thereby the judicial text documents released as judgements also grow in number. Lawyers must conduct extensive research to review numerous prior verdicts before concluding. The judicial procedure can move along much quicker if less investigation is devoted. The two activities that take up the most time are finding and comprehending the appropriate documents relevant to the case. To begin with, the prime responsibility of any legal expert, especially a legal practitioner, is to be able to get the relevant legal documents or judgments with the aid of information retrieval methods. After obtaining a document, it is essential to read it several times and draw necessary and appropriate conclusions after a thorough analysis. Legal publications are very long to read and comprehend and have a pretty elaborate structure compared to regular text. Each legal document consists of hundreds of pages of the statement, making it very difficult to get the documents relevant to the law practitioners and even making it a tedious task to read the whole judgment. To tackle the first issue, we propose a legal document retrieval system, and for the second issue, one of the engaging solutions is summarization. It is difficult for a Judge, Lawyer or general public to get the required information from these judgements without the need to read it completely. Hence, there is a need for getting precise information from large judicial judgments to understand the core of the judgments with the support from Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. Precise information such as the type of case, main and opponent party, and rules quoted, more particularly what happened, what issues were resolved are vital information for legal experts to speed up their work which in turn reduces the number of unresolved cases. Thus, the summarization of legal judgements is having potential need. Many new solutions have been introduced in the legal sector, where technology has enhanced the effectiveness of lawyers through contract analysis, trademark search software, legal research software, and much more. However, none of the AI-based software or initiatives aims to replace lawyers. In this proposed project, the main objective is to retrieve all the documents that are relevant to the user query/document (which can be legal judgment or query related to law) and present the summaries of all these retrieved legal documents in the ranking order of their relevance.