Automated Legal Processing
- by Chris S
Will it ever be possible to make legal systems quantifiable enough to process with computer algorithms? What technologies would have to be in place before this is possible? Are there any existing technologies that are already trying to accomplish this?
Out of curiosity, I downloaded the text for laws in my local municipality, and tried applying some simple NLP tricks to extract rules from sentences. I had mixed results. Some sentences were very explicit (e.g. "Cars may not be left in the park overnight"), but other sentences seemed hopelessly vague (e.g. "The council's purpose is to ensure the well-being of the community").
I apologize if this is too open-ended a topic, but I've often wondered what society would look like if legal systems were based on less ambiguous language. Lawyers, and the legal process in general, are so expensive because they have to manually process a complex set of rules codified in ambiguous legal texts. If this system could be represented in software, this huge expense could potentially be eliminated, making the legal system more accessible for everyone.
