Named-entity recognition in Turkish legal texts

Abstract Natural language processing (NLP) technologies and applications in legal text processing are gaining momentum. Being one of the most prominent tasks in NLP, named-entity recognition (NER) can substantiate a great convenience for NLP in law due to the variety of named entities in the legal domain and their accentuated importance in legal documents. However, domain-specific NER models in the legal domain are not well studied. We present a NER model for Turkish legal texts with a custom-made corpus as well as several NER architectures based on conditional random fields and bidirectional long-short-term memories (BiLSTMs) to address the task. We also study several combinations of different word embeddings consisting of GloVe, Morph2Vec, and neural network-based character feature extraction techniques either with BiLSTM or convolutional neural networks. We report 92.27% F1 score with a hybrid word representation of GloVe and Morph2Vec with character-level features extracted with BiLSTM. Being an agglutinative language, the morphological structure of Turkish is also considered. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first legal domain-specific NER study in Turkish and also the first study for an agglutinative language in the legal domain. Thus, our work can also have implications beyond the Turkish language.