Judicial Intelligent Assistant System: Extracting Events from Divorce Cases to Detect Disputes for the Judge
This work addresses the time-consuming and error-prone task of dispute detection in divorce cases for judges and legal officers, representing an incremental improvement over manual and basic automated methods.
The authors tackled the problem of manually extracting key information from divorce case materials by proposing a two-round-labeling event extraction technique to automatically detect disputes, resulting in a system that performs more effectively and efficiently than existing methods.
In formal procedure of civil cases, the textual materials provided by different parties describe the development process of the cases. It is a difficult but necessary task to extract the key information for the cases from these textual materials and to clarify the dispute focus of related parties. Currently, officers read the materials manually and use methods, such as keyword searching and regular matching, to get the target information. These approaches are time-consuming and heavily depending on prior knowledge and carefulness of the officers. To assist the officers to enhance working efficiency and accuracy, we propose an approach to detect disputes from divorce cases based on a two-round-labeling event extracting technique in this paper. We implement the Judicial Intelligent Assistant (JIA) system according to the proposed approach to 1) automatically extract focus events from divorce case materials, 2) align events by identifying co-reference among them, and 3) detect conflicts among events brought by the plaintiff and the defendant. With the JIA system, it is convenient for judges to determine the disputed issues. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach and system can obtain the focus of cases and detect conflicts more effectively and efficiently comparing with existing method.