Unsupervised Legal Concept Extraction from Indian Case Documents using Statutes

Abstract

Finding legal concepts pertaining to court case judgement documents, is an important task in the field of legal data mining. These concepts are also popularly termed as catchwords/keywords. Existing methods for the task lack the ability to extract legal concepts that may not explicitly be mentioned in the document, but present abstractly. This is because the methods do not incorporate legal domain specific information. In this paper, we propose the use of Statutes to solve this task. Evaluation on a set of 1200 Indian Supreme Court Case Documents suggest the effectiveness of our approach, and opens the possibilities of exploring more in this direction.