articlePeerJ Computer ScienceOct 24, 2016GOLD OA

Predicting judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights: a Natural Language Processing perspective

University of London · Amazon (United Kingdom) · +3 more institutions

Indexed incrossrefdoaj

Abstract

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning provide us with the tools to build predictive models that can be used to unveil patterns driving judicial decisions. This can be useful, for both lawyers and judges, as an assisting tool to rapidly identify cases and extract patterns which lead to certain decisions. This paper presents the first systematic study on predicting the outcome of cases tried by the European Court of Human Rights based solely on textual content. We formulate a binary classification task where the input of our classifiers is the textual content extracted from a case and the target output is the actual judgment as to whether there has been a violation of an article of…

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763
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FWCI
206.12
Percentile
100%
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51
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Authors

4

Topics & keywords

Keywords
  • Computer science
  • Convention
  • Natural language processing
  • Judicial opinion
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Perspective (graphical)
  • Binary classification
  • Task (project management)
UN Sustainable Development Goals
  • Peace, Justice and strong institutions
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