Namita Mittal

Vedant Parikh, Vidit Mathur, Parth Mehta et al.

Unlike the courts in western countries, public records of Indian judiciary are completely unstructured and noisy. No large scale publicly available annotated datasets of Indian legal documents exist till date. This limits the scope for legal analytics research. In this work, we propose a new dataset consisting of over 10,000 judgements delivered by the supreme court of India and their corresponding hand written summaries. The proposed dataset is pre-processed by normalising common legal abbreviations, handling spelling variations in named entities, handling bad punctuations and accurate sentence tokenization. Each sentence is tagged with their rhetorical roles. We also annotate each judgement with several attributes like date, names of the plaintiffs, defendants and the people representing them, judges who delivered the judgement, acts/statutes that are cited and the most common citations used to refer the judgement. Further, we propose an automatic labelling technique for identifying sentences which have summary worthy information. We demonstrate that this auto labeled data can be used effectively to train a weakly supervised sentence extractor with high accuracy. Some possible applications of this dataset besides legal document summarization can be in retrieval, citation analysis and prediction of decisions by a particular judge.

Lokesh Kumar Sharma, Namita Mittal

Question Answering (QA) research is a significant and challenging task in Natural Language Processing. QA aims to extract an exact answer from a relevant text snippet or a document. The motivation behind QA research is the need of user who is using state-of-the-art search engines. The user expects an exact answer rather than a list of documents that probably contain the answer. In this paper, for a successful answer extraction from relevant documents several efficient features and relations are required to extract. The features include various lexical, syntactic, semantic and structural features. The proposed structural features are extracted from the dependency features of the question and supported document. Experimental results show that structural features improve the accuracy of answer extraction when combined with the basic features and designed using dependency principles. Proposed structural features use new design principles which extract the long-distance relations. This addition is a possible reason behind the improvement in overall answer extraction accuracy.

Namita Mittal, Basant Agarwal, Ajay Gupta et al.

Recent developments in the ICT industry in past few decades has enabled the quick and easy access to the information available on the internet. But, digital literacy is the pre-requisite for its use. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an interface for digitally illiterate users, especially farmers to efficiently and effectively retrieve information through Internet. In addition, to enable the farmers to identify the disease in their crop, its cause and symptoms using digital image processing and pattern recognition instantly without waiting for an expert to visit the farms and identify the disease.