Ahmed Izzidien

Ahmed Izzidien, Holli Sargeant, Felix Steffek

To undertake computational research of the law, efficiently identifying datasets of court decisions that relate to a specific legal issue is a crucial yet challenging endeavour. This study addresses the gap in the literature working with large legal corpora about how to isolate cases, in our case summary judgments, from a large corpus of UK court decisions. We introduce a comparative analysis of two computational methods: (1) a traditional natural language processing-based approach leveraging expert-generated keywords and logical operators and (2) an innovative application of the Claude 2 large language model to classify cases based on content-specific prompts. We use the Cambridge Law Corpus of 356,011 UK court decisions and determine that the large language model achieves a weighted F1 score of 0.94 versus 0.78 for keywords. Despite iterative refinement, the search logic based on keywords fails to capture nuances in legal language. We identify and extract 3,102 summary judgment cases, enabling us to map their distribution across various UK courts over a temporal span. The paper marks a pioneering step in employing advanced natural language processing to tackle core legal research tasks, demonstrating how these technologies can bridge systemic gaps and enhance the accessibility of legal information. We share the extracted dataset metrics to support further research on summary judgments.

Holli Sargeant, Ahmed Izzidien, Felix Steffek

This paper addresses a critical gap in legal analytics by developing and applying a novel taxonomy for topic classification of summary judgment cases in the United Kingdom. Using a curated dataset of summary judgment cases, we use the Large Language Model Claude 3 Opus to explore functional topics and trends. We find that Claude 3 Opus correctly classified the topic with an accuracy of 87.13% and an F1 score of 0.87. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in the application of summary judgments across various legal domains. As case law in the United Kingdom is not originally labelled with keywords or a topic filtering option, the findings not only refine our understanding of the thematic underpinnings of summary judgments but also illustrate the potential of combining traditional and AI-driven approaches in legal classification. Therefore, this paper provides a new and general taxonomy for UK law. The implications of this work serve as a foundation for further research and policy discussions in the field of judicial administration and computational legal research methodologies.

Ahmed Izzidien

Personal Social Ontology (PSO), it is proposed, is how an individual perceives the ontological properties of terms. For example, an absolute fatalist would arguably use terms that remove any form of agency from a person. Such fatalism has the impact of ontologically defining acts such as winning, victory and success in a manner that is contrary to how a non-fatalist would ontologically define them. While both the said fatalist and non-fatalist would agree on the dictionary definition of these terms, they would differ on specifically how they can be brought about. This difference between the two individuals can be induced from their usage of these terms, i.e., the co-occurrence of these terms with other terms. As such a quantification of this such co-occurrence offers an avenue to characterise the social ontological views of the speaker. In this paper we ask, what specific term co-occurrence should be measured in order to obtain a valid and reliable psychometric measure of a persons social ontology? We consider the social psychology and social neuroscience literature to arrive at a list of social concepts that can be considered principal features of personal social ontology, and then propose an NLP pipeline to capture the articulation of these terms in language.

Ahmed Izzidien, David Stillwell

In this paper we present a natural language programming framework to consider how the fairness of acts can be measured. For the purposes of the paper, a fair act is defined as one that one would be accepting of if it were done to oneself. The approach is based on an implementation of the golden rule (GR) in the digital domain. Despite the GRs prevalence as an axiom throughout history, no transfer of this moral philosophy into computational systems exists. In this paper we consider how to algorithmically operationalise this rule so that it may be used to measure sentences such as: the boy harmed the girl, and categorise them as fair or unfair. A review and reply to criticisms of the GR is made. A suggestion of how the technology may be implemented to avoid unfair biases in word embeddings is made - given that individuals would typically not wish to be on the receiving end of an unfair act, such as racism, irrespective of whether the corpus being used deems such discrimination as praiseworthy.

Ahmed Izzidien, David Stillwell

Fairness is a principal social value that can be observed in civilisations around the world. A manifestation of this is in social agreements, often described in texts, such as contracts. Yet, despite the prevalence of such, a fairness metric for texts describing a social act remains wanting. To address this, we take a step back to consider the problem based on first principals. Instead of using rules or templates, we utilise social psychology literature to determine the principal factors that humans use when making a fairness assessment. We then attempt to digitise these using word embeddings into a multi-dimensioned sentence level fairness perceptions vector to serve as an approximation for these fairness perceptions. The method leverages a pro-social bias within word embeddings, for which we obtain an F1= 81.0. A second approach, using PCA and ML based on the said fairness approximation vector produces an F1 score of 86.2. We detail improvements that can be made in the methodology to incorporate the projection of sentence embedding on to a subspace representation of fairness.