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Salomon: Automatic Abstracting of Legal Cases for Effective Access to Court Decisions

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Abstract

The SALOMON project is a contribution to the automatic processing of legal texts. Its aim is to automatically summarise Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future cases. Therefore, techniques are developed for identifying and extracting relevant information from the cases. A broader application of these techniques could considerably simplify the work of the legal profession.

A double methodology was used when developing SALOMON: the cases are processed by employing additional knowledge to interpret structural patterns and features on the one hand and by way of occurrence statistics of index terms on the other. As a result, SALOMON performs an initial categorisation and structuring of the cases and subsequently extracts the most relevant text units of the alleged offences and of the opinion of the court. The SALOMON techniques do not themselves solve any legal questions, but they do guide the user effectively towards relevant texts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and IT (ICRI) K.U. Leuven, Tiensestraat 41, B-3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Caroline Uyttendaele, Marie-Francine Moens & Jos Dumortier

Authors
  1. Caroline Uyttendaele
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  2. Marie-Francine Moens
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  3. Jos Dumortier
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Uyttendaele, C., Moens, MF. & Dumortier, J. Salomon: Automatic Abstracting of Legal Cases for Effective Access to Court Decisions. Artificial Intelligence and Law 6, 59–79 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008256030548

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