Extracting Case Law Sentences for Argumentation about the Meaning of Statutory Terms
نویسندگان
چکیده
Legal argumentation often centers on the interpretation and understanding of terminology. Statutory texts are known for a frequent use of vague terms that are difficult to understand. Arguments about the meaning of statutory terms are an inseparable part of applying statutory law to a specific factual context. In this work we investigate the possibility of supporting this type of argumentation by automatic extraction of sentences that deal with the meaning of a term. We focus on case law because court decisions often contain sentences elaborating on the meaning of one or more terms. We show that human annotators can reasonably agree on the usefulness of a sentence for an argument about the meaning (interpretive usefulness) of a specific statutory term (kappa>0.66). We specify a list of features that could be used to predict the interpretive usefulness of a sentence automatically. We work with offthe-shelf classification algorithms to confirm the hypothesis (accuracy>0.69).
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