Judicial intelligent assistant system: Extracting events from Chinese divorce cases to detect disputes for the judge

Abstract

AbstractIn the formal procedure of Chinese 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 depend on prior knowledge and the carefulness of the officers. To assist the officers in enhancing working efficiency and accuracy, we conduct a case study of detecting disputes from Chinese divorce cases based on proposing a Two‐Round‐Labeling (TRL) event extracting technique in this article. 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 in Chinese divorce cases. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach and system can obtain the focus of Chinese divorce cases and detect conflicts more effectively and efficiently compared with the existing method.