Bartosz Brożek, Michał Furman, Marek Jakubiec, Bartłomiej Kucharzyk
{"title":"The black box problem revisited. Real and imaginary challenges for automated legal decision making","authors":"Bartosz Brożek, Michał Furman, Marek Jakubiec, Bartłomiej Kucharzyk","doi":"10.1007/s10506-023-09356-9","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10506-023-09356-9","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>This paper addresses the black-box problem in artificial intelligence (AI), and the related problem of explainability of AI in the legal context. We argue, first, that the black box problem is, in fact, a superficial one as it results from an overlap of four different – albeit interconnected – issues: the opacity problem, the strangeness problem, the unpredictability problem, and the justification problem. Thus, we propose a framework for discussing both the black box problem and the explainability of AI. We argue further that contrary to often defended claims the opacity issue is not a genuine problem. We also dismiss the justification problem. Further, we describe the tensions involved in the strangeness and unpredictability problems and suggest some ways to alleviate them.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51336,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence and Law","volume":"32 2","pages":"427 - 440"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2023-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10506-023-09356-9.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46797808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Maxime C Cohen, Samuel Dahan, Warut Khern-Am-Nuai, Hajime Shimao, Jonathan Touboul
{"title":"The use of AI in legal systems: determining independent contractor vs. employee status.","authors":"Maxime C Cohen, Samuel Dahan, Warut Khern-Am-Nuai, Hajime Shimao, Jonathan Touboul","doi":"10.1007/s10506-023-09353-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10506-023-09353-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker's status-employee vs. independent contractor-in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of the gig economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker's status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds.</p>","PeriodicalId":51336,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence and Law","volume":" ","pages":"1-30"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10061388/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9742579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A formalization of the Protagoras court paradox in a temporal logic of epistemic and normative reasons","authors":"Meghdad Ghari","doi":"10.1007/s10506-023-09351-0","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10506-023-09351-0","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We combine linear temporal logic (with both past and future modalities) with a deontic version of justification logic to provide a framework for reasoning about time and epistemic and normative reasons. In addition to temporal modalities, the resulting logic contains two kinds of justification assertions: epistemic justification assertions and deontic justification assertions. The former presents justification for the agent’s knowledge and the latter gives reasons for why a proposition is obligatory. We present two kinds of semantics for the logic: one based on Fitting models and the other based on neighborhood models. The use of neighborhood semantics enables us to define the dual of deontic justification assertions properly, which corresponds to a notion of permission in deontic logic. We then establish the soundness and completeness of an axiom system of the logic with respect to these semantics. Further, we formalize the Protagoras versus Euathlus paradox in this logic and present a precise analysis of the paradox, and also briefly discuss Leibniz’s solution.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51336,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence and Law","volume":"32 2","pages":"325 - 367"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44602578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fábio M. Oliveira, Marcelo S. Balbino, Luis E. Zarate, Fawn Ngo, Ramakrishna Govindu, Anurag Agarwal, Cristiane N. Nobre
{"title":"Predicting inmates misconduct using the SHAP approach","authors":"Fábio M. Oliveira, Marcelo S. Balbino, Luis E. Zarate, Fawn Ngo, Ramakrishna Govindu, Anurag Agarwal, Cristiane N. Nobre","doi":"10.1007/s10506-023-09352-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10506-023-09352-z","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Internal misconduct is a universal problem in prisons and affects the maintenance of social order. Consequently, correctional institutions often develop rehabilitation programs to reduce the likelihood of inmates committing internal offenses and criminal recidivism after release. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the profile of each offender, both for the appropriate indication of a rehabilitation program and the level of internal security to which he must be submitted. In this context, this work aims to discover the most significant characteristics in predicting inmate misconduct from ML methods and the SHAP approach. A database produced in 2004 through the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities in the United States of America was used, which provides nationally representative data on prisoners from state and federal facilities. The predictive model based on Random Forest performed the best, thus, we applied the SHAP to it. Overall, the results showed that features related to victimization, type of crime committed, age and age at first arrest, history of association with criminal groups, education, and drug and alcohol use are most relevant in predicting internal misconduct. Thus, it is expected to contribute to the prior classification of an inmate on time, to use programs and practices that aim to improve the lives of offenders, their reintegration into society, and consequently, the reduction of criminal recidivism.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51336,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence and Law","volume":"32 2","pages":"369 - 395"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43644754","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Semantic matching based legal information retrieval system for COVID-19 pandemic","authors":"Junlin Zhu, Jiaye Wu, Xudong Luo, Jie Liu","doi":"10.1007/s10506-023-09354-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10506-023-09354-x","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Recently, the pandemic caused by COVID-19 is severe in the entire world. The prevention and control of crimes associated with COVID-19 are critical for controlling the pandemic. Therefore, to provide efficient and convenient intelligent legal knowledge services during the pandemic, we develop an intelligent system for legal information retrieval on the WeChat platform in this paper. The data source we used for training our system is “The typical cases of national procuratorial authorities handling crimes against the prevention and control of the new coronary pneumonia pandemic following the law”, which is published online by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate of the People’s Republic of China. We base our system on convolutional neural network and use the semantic matching mechanism to capture inter-sentence relationship information and make a prediction. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary learning process to help the network better distinguish the relation between two sentences. Finally, the system uses the trained model to identify the information entered by a user and responds to the user with a reference case similar to the query case and gives the reference legal gist applicable to the query case.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51336,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence and Law","volume":"32 2","pages":"397 - 426"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10074769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ensemble methods for improving extractive summarization of legal case judgements","authors":"Aniket Deroy, Kripabandhu Ghosh, Saptarshi Ghosh","doi":"10.1007/s10506-023-09349-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10506-023-09349-8","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Summarization of legal case judgement documents is a practical and challenging problem, for which many summarization algorithms of different varieties have been tried. In this work, rather than developing yet another summarization algorithm, we investigate if intelligently ensembling (combining) the outputs of multiple (base) summarization algorithms can lead to better summaries of legal case judgements than any of the base algorithms. Using two datasets of case judgement documents from the Indian Supreme Court, one with extractive gold standard summaries and the other with abstractive gold standard summaries, we apply various ensembling techniques on summaries generated by a wide variety of summarization algorithms. The ensembling methods applied range from simple voting-based methods to ranking-based and graph-based ensembling methods. We show that many of our ensembling methods yield summaries that are better than the summaries produced by any of the individual base algorithms, in terms of ROUGE and METEOR scores.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51336,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence and Law","volume":"32 1","pages":"231 - 289"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46658483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Going beyond the “common suspects”: to be presumed innocent in the era of algorithms, big data and artificial intelligence","authors":"Athina Sachoulidou","doi":"10.1007/s10506-023-09347-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-023-09347-w","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51336,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence and Law","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48818700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Joining metadata and textual features to advise administrative courts decisions: a cascading classifier approach","authors":"Hugo Mentzingen, Nuno Antonio, Victor Lobo","doi":"10.1007/s10506-023-09348-9","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10506-023-09348-9","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Decisions of regulatory government bodies and courts affect many aspects of citizens’ lives. These organizations and courts are expected to provide timely and coherent decisions, although they struggle to keep up with the increasing demand. The ability of machine learning (ML) models to predict such decisions based on past cases under similar circumstances was assessed in some recent works. The dominant conclusion is that the prediction goal is achievable with high accuracy. Nevertheless, most of those works do not consider important aspects for ML models that can impact performance and affect real-world usefulness, such as consistency, out-of-sample applicability, generality, and explainability preservation. To our knowledge, none considered all those aspects, and no previous study addressed the joint use of metadata and text-extracted variables to predict administrative decisions. We propose a predictive model that addresses the abovementioned concerns based on a two-stage cascade classifier. The model employs a first-stage prediction based on textual features extracted from the original documents and a second-stage classifier that includes proceedings’ metadata. The study was conducted using time-based cross-validation, built on data available before the predicted judgment. It provides predictions as soon as the decision date is scheduled and only considers the first document in each proceeding, along with the metadata recorded when the infringement is first registered. Finally, the proposed model provides local explainability by preserving visibility on the textual features and employing the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Our findings suggest that this cascade approach surpasses the standalone stages and achieves relatively high Precision and Recall when both text and metadata are available while preserving real-world usefulness. With a weighted F1 score of 0.900, the results outperform the text-only baseline by 1.24% and the metadata-only baseline by 5.63%, with better discriminative properties evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic and precision-recall curves.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51336,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence and Law","volume":"32 1","pages":"201 - 230"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10506-023-09348-9.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45108787","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A sentence is known by the company it keeps: Improving Legal Document Summarization Using Deep Clustering","authors":"Deepali Jain, Malaya Dutta Borah, Anupam Biswas","doi":"10.1007/s10506-023-09345-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s10506-023-09345-y","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The appropriate understanding and fast processing of lengthy legal documents are computationally challenging problems. Designing efficient automatic summarization techniques can potentially be the key to deal with such issues. Extractive summarization is one of the most popular approaches for forming summaries out of such lengthy documents, via the process of summary-relevant sentence selection. An efficient application of this approach involves appropriate scoring of sentences, which helps in the identification of more informative and essential sentences from the document. In this work, a novel sentence scoring approach DCESumm is proposed which consists of supervised sentence-level summary relevance prediction, as well as unsupervised clustering-based document-level score enhancement. Experimental results on two legal document summarization datasets, BillSum and Forum of Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), reveal that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art approaches. More specifically it achieves ROUGE metric F1-score improvements of (1−6)% and (6−12)% for the BillSum and FIRE test sets respectively. Such impressive summarization results suggest the usefulness of the proposed approach in finding the gist of a lengthy legal document, thereby providing crucial assistance to legal practitioners.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":51336,"journal":{"name":"Artificial Intelligence and Law","volume":"32 1","pages":"165 - 200"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43077802","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}