Jinzhe Tan

Samyar Janatian, Hannes Westermann, Jinzhe Tan et al. · cmu

Encoding legislative text in a formal representation is an important prerequisite to different tasks in the field of AI & Law. For example, rule-based expert systems focused on legislation can support laypeople in understanding how legislation applies to them and provide them with helpful context and information. However, the process of analyzing legislation and other sources to encode it in the desired formal representation can be time-consuming and represents a bottleneck in the development of such systems. Here, we investigate to what degree large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, are able to automatically extract structured representations from legislation. We use LLMs to create pathways from legislation, according to the JusticeBot methodology for legal decision support systems, evaluate the pathways and compare them to manually created pathways. The results are promising, with 60% of generated pathways being rated as equivalent or better than manually created ones in a blind comparison. The approach suggests a promising path to leverage the capabilities of LLMs to ease the costly development of systems based on symbolic approaches that are transparent and explainable.

Jinzhe Tan, Karim Benyekhlef

Access to justice remains a global challenge, with many citizens still finding it difficult to seek help from the justice system when facing legal issues. Although the internet provides abundant legal information and services, navigating complex websites, understanding legal terminology, and filling out procedural forms continue to pose barriers to accessing justice. This paper introduces the LegalWebAgent framework that employs a web agent powered by multimodal large language models to bridge the gap in access to justice for ordinary citizens. The framework combines the natural language understanding capabilities of large language models with multimodal perception, enabling a complete process from user query to concrete action. It operates in three stages: the Ask Module understands user needs through natural language processing; the Browse Module autonomously navigates webpages, interacts with page elements (including forms and calendars), and extracts information from HTML structures and webpage screenshots; the Act Module synthesizes information for users or performs direct actions like form completion and schedule booking. To evaluate its effectiveness, we designed a benchmark test covering 15 real-world tasks, simulating typical legal service processes relevant to Québec civil law users, from problem identification to procedural operations. Evaluation results show LegalWebAgent achieved a peak success rate of 86.7%, with an average of 84.4% across all tested models, demonstrating high autonomy in complex real-world scenarios.