Analyzing Hong Kong's Legal Judgments from a Computational Linguistics point-of-view
This work addresses the lack of affordable and accessible tools for analyzing legal judgments in Hong Kong's court system, making it easier for legal professionals and researchers to extract key information.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing Hong Kong's legal judgments by developing computational methods, including statistical, machine learning, and zero-shot learning approaches, to automate tasks like citation network generation and keyword analysis, resulting in faster and less tedious extraction of insights.
Analysis and extraction of useful information from legal judgments using computational linguistics was one of the earliest problems posed in the domain of information retrieval. Presently, several commercial vendors exist who automate such tasks. However, a crucial bottleneck arises in the form of exorbitant pricing and lack of resources available in analysis of judgements mete out by Hong Kong's Legal System. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing several statistical, machine learning, deep learning and zero-shot learning based methods to effectively analyze legal judgments from Hong Kong's Court System. The methods proposed consists of: (1) Citation Network Graph Generation, (2) PageRank Algorithm, (3) Keyword Analysis and Summarization, (4) Sentiment Polarity, and (5) Paragrah Classification, in order to be able to extract key insights from individual as well a group of judgments together. This would make the overall analysis of judgments in Hong Kong less tedious and more automated in order to extract insights quickly using fast inferencing. We also provide an analysis of our results by benchmarking our results using Large Language Models making robust use of the HuggingFace ecosystem.