Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements

The first attempts to systematise citation information were done in the field of common law by the developers of legal citators, starting with Frank Shepard in 1873, who relied on human expertise to provide discourse-aware summaries of case law citations. More recently, citation information is presented as in LexisNexis Shepard’s Citations Service.

Despite lawyers being the pioneers of citation analysis (Ogden 1993b), the research on citation analysis in common law has not been developing as fast as citation analysis in the domain of scientific reports. Garfield (1955) is often cited as one of the pioneers and key contributors towards citation analysis in science. Garfield was inspired by the Shepard’s citations and argued that similar methodologies can be useful for summarisation of scientific citations (Garfield 1955). Garfield employed a bibliographic approach to create ICI Citation Indexes, and the data from citation indexes was later used for a number of bibliometric studies that “extract, aggregate and analyse quantitative aspects of bibliographic information” (Moed 2005). He believed that citation analysis could be used for evaluation of scientific performance, for example, in calculation of journal ranks based on citation frequency and impact. As noted by Moed (2005), quantitative data from bibliometric studies is widely used to assess the performance of individual scholars, scientific journals, research institutions and “general, structural aspects of the scholarly system” (e.g. measuring trends in national publication output). Moed (2005) also concluded that ICI citation indexes do not “capture motives of individuals, but their consequences at an aggregate level” and argued for further development of qualitative citation based indicators, thus abandoning the principle underlying most citation analyses that “all citations are equal”. Qualitative approaches in citation analysis take into account the intentions of the person who was providing the citation. They aim to capture citation qualities that are overlooked by quantitative methodologies, for example, such as polarity and sentiment. A scientific article may be frequently cited, but it can be due to criticisms or mere acknowledgements, which distinguishes it from an article introducing an approach that is widely accepted and utilised. Several researchers can be mentioned in respect of qualitative citation based indicators in science (Moravcsik and Murugesan 1975; Swales 1986; Cano 1989; Teufel et al. 2006; Athar and Teufel 2012). Cronin (1982) conducted a research of citation behaviours and noted that at the time there was not a universal approach in citation studies. Application of qualitative citation based indicators often relies on linguistic discourse markers to generate conclusions about citations and citing behaviours. For example, citations can be classified according to sentiment polarities: confirmative or negative (Moravcsik and Murugesan 1975); positive, neutral or weak (Teufel et al. 2006). Aspects of qualitative analysis of citations is relevant to our approach.

Recently there has been more interest toward citation studies in law, where there appear to be two major directions: applying network analysis to citations (Zhang and Koppaka 2007; Leicht et al. 2007; Winkels et al. 2011; Lupu and Voeten 2012; van Opijnen 2012; Neale 2013) and classification systems allowing one to estimate the “treatment” status of the cited case (Jackson et al. 2003; Galgani et al. 2015).

Zhang and Koppaka (2007) developed a Semantics-Based Legal Citation Network (see Zhang et al. (2014) for an overview of related work), a tool that extracts and summarises citation information into a network, allowing the users to “easily navigate in the citation networks and study how citations are interrelated and how legal issues have evolved in the past.” The researchers note that different parts of a case can be cited. Studying the reasons for citation can provide valuable information for a legal researcher. Their approach relied on RFC (reason for citing), a patented technology that allows extracting reasons of why the case has been cited. RFC performance was summarised in the patent (Humphrey et al. 2005), which explored a methodology of “identifying sentences near a document citation (such as a court case citation) that suggest the reason(s) for citing (RFC)”. The task of identifying RFC may be somewhat similar to the task that is undertaken as a part of this project due to the fact that information contained in principles and facts of cited cases can be used as a part of estimating reasons for citing. However, the methodology of Humphrey et al. (2005) is largely based on an analysis of word frequencies; there is no machine learning and no evaluation is presented. This contrasts with our approach to identifying the relevant statements with reference to particular features and associating them to a specific citation in a decision in situ; our approach applies machine learning and is evaluated.

History Assistant Jackson et al. (2003) was designed to automatically infer direct and indirect treatment history from case reports. Direct treatment history covered historically related cases, such as appeals etc. Indirect treatment history dealt with the cited cases within a document in order to establish how the cited case has been treated. It relied on the classification methodology of Shepard’s citations that combines the knowledge about sentiment and aims of legal communication with heuristic information about court hierarchy. It includes such classes as applied, overruled and distinguished. History Assistant was expected to be an aid for editorial work rather than replace the effort of the editors. The program consisted of a set of natural language modules and a prior case retrieval module. Natural language processing relied on machine learning methodology and employed statistical methods over annotated corpus. The tools and corpora are unavailable for replication. While Shepardisation is intrinsically interesting and difficult task, we found little overt textual evidence to reliably facilitate machine learning.

Galgani et al. (2015) created LEXA—a system that relied on RDR (Ripple Down Rules) approach to identify citations within the “distinguished” class. This category is generally best linguistically signaled and is therefore suitable for achieving high precision and recall. The key idea underpinning RDR was that the “domain expert monitors the system and whenever it performs incorrectly he signals the error and provides as a correction a rule based on the case which generated the error, which is added to the knowledge base” (Galgani et al. 2015). The approach employed annotators to create an initial set of rules leaving the end users to refine and further expand the set. The authors claimed that “the user can at any stage create new annotations and use them in creating rules” which may put a more significant reliance on the user input than an end user may be equipped or expecting to provide. LEXA employed 78 rules that recognized “distinguished” citations with a precision of 70% and recall of 48.6% on the cleaned test set, which is significantly lower than the results reported by Jackson et al. (2003) for the same category: precision (94%) and recall (90%). The difference in results suggests that a complex fine-grained analysis used by Jackson et al. (2003) that included machine-learning for language processing may help achieve better classification outcomes. Our study does not consider classifications of citations.

In Grabmair et al. (2015), the primary objective is to rank documents for Information Retrieval using the Lucene engine. As part of their work, they created a gold standard wherein statements are annotated as legal principles or evidence along with annotations for aspects of subsentential structure; such sentences are treated preferentially when evaluating document relevance to a search query. Some success is reported in automatically annotating the statements using a mix of n-gram features and entity types, identified through manually coded UIMA rules. Subsequent work in Bansal et al. (2016) provide additional features and report some improvement in performance, particularly in ranking. The work is carried out on a domain specific set of cases (US Special Masters Vaccine Injury Decisions), which may not generalise; our work is domain neutral. The features (n-gram and entity types) used in Grabmair et al. (2015) are not as clearly tied to statement annotations as in our approach. Our approach does not consider ranking or high level properties of decisions, but tying specific statements of legal principles and evidence to citations within decisions; our results are promising.

There have been a variety of attempts aimed at automated extraction of argumentation structure of text and its constituents. Clearly the identification of statements of legal principle and evidence tied to a citation in a decision is relevant to the presentation of the overall legal argument. However, argumentation structure is a larger scale matter within which we can locate our specific study.

The methodologies employed by such studies often rely on extraction and further analysis of linguistic information that is available within the text. One of the relatively recent successful examples of argumentation extraction methodology can be argumentation zoning. This approach is based on the assumption that the argumentation structure can be presented as a combination of rhetorical zones that are used to group the statements according to their rhetorical role. This approach was initially used for scientific reports (Teufel et al. 1999, 2009). Hachey and Grover (2006) used argumentation zoning to create summaries for common law reports. Note that argumentative zoning, both for science (Teufel et al. 1999) and for law (Hachey and Grover 2006), is very much aimed at capturing the argumentation used by the author of that paper or judgement. All sentences summarising previous papers or judgements are annotated as a single category (OTHER (Teufel et al. 1999) or PROCEEDINGS (Hachey and Grover 2006). Our work differs in that we aim to mine descriptions of previous judgements for facts and principles. With respect to the methodology used for automatic classification of sentences, both these studies rely on manually constructed linguistic knowledge bases (e.g. a categorisation of cue phrases used in science and regular expressions for matching them (Teufel et al. 1999), or specially developed Named Entity Tools to identify judges, appellants, respondents, etc. (Hachey and Grover 2006), and report acceptable results for most of the categories, with some categories performing better than others. We do not rely on such manually developed resources, and restrict ourselves to linguistic features derived from the sentences themselves. We do, however, follow these studies closely in the methodology used to manually annotate our corpus and report agreement between annotators.

An approach similar to argumentation zoning was taken by Farzindar and Lapalme (2004) to develop a scheme for identification of argument structure of Canadian case law and Kuhn (2010) to analyse the structure of German court decisions. A methodology relying on manual annotation of discourse structures and in that respect similar to argumentation zoning was used by Wyner (2010) to detect case elements such as case citation, cases cited, precedential relationships, names of parties, judges, attorneys, court sort, roles of parties (i.e. plaintiff or defendant), attorneys, and final decision. Whilst the methodology developed does not aim to fully reconstruct argumentation structure, the information obtained during the study can be used as a part of a wider application.

Wyner et al. (2010) conducted a study aimed at identification of argumentation parts with the use of context-free grammars. Similar to Jackson et al. (2003) the study reports the following difficulties with identifying argumentation structures in legal texts: “(a) the detection of intermediate conclusions, especially the ones without rhetorical markers, as more than 20% of the conclusions are classified as premises of a higher layer conclusion; (b) the ambiguity between argument structures.” The results reported are as follows: premises—59% precision, 70% recall; conclusions—61% precision, 75% recall; non-argumentative information—89% precision, 80% recall.

The methodology of applying statistical tools over annotated corpus was employed by Moens et al. (2007) to automatically detect sentences that are a part of the legal argument. The study achieved 68% accuracy for legal texts. Ashley and Walker (2013) aimed to extract “argumentation-relevant information automatically from a corpus of legal decision documents” and “build new arguments using that information”.

A related, important distinction that should be made with regard to legal argumentation is the idea that the cited legal principles can be classed as ratio or obiter. As defined by Raz (2002): “ratio decidendi can be understood as those statements of law which are based on the facts as found and upon which the decision is based.” Statements that are usually included into obiter class are dissenting statements and statements that are “based upon either nonexistent or immaterial facts of the case” (Raz 2002). From the point of view of law the main difference between ratio and obiter is that the former is binding, while the latter only possesses persuasive powers. Branting (1994a) tried to automatically identify and extract ratio. Plug (2000) tried to identify obiter statements. However, the distinctions between ratio or obiter will not be used as a part of this work.

The corpus for the gold standard was compiled from 50 common law reports that had been taken from the British and Irish Legal Institute (BAILII) website in RTF format. Most reports used for this study only provided the leading opinion and were narrated by the court in the form of monologue speech. The topics that were covered by the selected reports were related to civil matters, mainly issues covered by contract, trust and property law.⁴ The length and structure of reports varied, which was most often defined by the complexity of the matter: longer and more complicated cases often had more sections. As reported by GATE Sentence Splitter (GATE 8.0.), the full corpus contained 1211012 tokens (or words) and 22617 sentences which included headings and other units that didn’t form full sentences from grammatical point of view. Most reports had a section on the top introducing the court, the parties, legal representatives, case number etc. It was often the case that the legal situation was presented in the introduction and that the legal analysis was in the middle of the report. However, the reports did not follow a universal format. Conclusions were often short and situated at the end of the report. Case law citations are used to support legal argumentation and are therefore referred to as a part of legal analysis. For that reason they were rarely found in introduction or conclusion.

Annotator 1 created annotation guidelines (high level task definition, descriptions and examples for each category, and analyses of a few difficult cases) in several iterations and trained Annotator 2 on their use. The annotators were expected to identify sentences that contained the legal principles and facts of the cited cases, based on the written guidelines. Sentences associated with cited cases that are neither principles or facts are annotated as neutral. The key points of the guidelines, which were 7 pages long, are summarised below.

The task of annotation focused on the identification of cited information within annotation areas that were defined as paragraphs having at least one citation. Citation instances had been manually annotated prior to the study. The proportion of the sentences in the gold standard corpus that were annotated within the annotation areas corresponds to around \(12\%\) (or 2659 sentences). The control corpus used for the human agreement study contained 301486 tokens, 5716 sentences (\(25\%\) of the gold standard corpus) and 241 references to citation names (\(29\%\) of the gold standard corpus). The proportion of sentences in the control corpus that were situated within the annotation areas was \(14\%\) (821 sentences in total).

Given the discussion of the complexity of jurisprudential views of legal principles, we have taken an operationalised view, based on the analysis of a legal scholar and key linguistic indicators. A nine page annotation manual was produced to define each category and provide examples and counter examples for difficult cases. The key points are summarised here.

The results of the inter-annotator agreement study are as follows: \(\kappa\) = 0.65⁵ (% Agreement = 83.7). The intra-annotator agreement study showed that Annotator 1 (when annotating the same set of 10 reports three months apart in time) was extremely consistent: \(\kappa\) = 0.95 (% Agreement = 97.3).

Annotator 1 proceeded to create a gold corpus of 50 reports which was used for training a machine classifier, as described next.

In addition, we used three other features that captured the length of the sentence (number of words), its position in the text (on a scale of 0–1) and whether or not there is a citation in the sentence (boolean).

We used NLTK (Bird 2006) to extract part of speech tags and Stanford CoreNLP (Manning et al. 2014) to extract grammatical relations or dependencies. The other features were derived by means of a python script.

Tables 2 and 3 report the classification performance of the Naive Bayes Multinomial classifier from the Weka toolkit (Hall et al. 2009). Feature selection reduced the number of features from 51576 to 887; we report more on the selected features later in this section.

In the learnt Bayesian model, part of speech features such as ‘MD’ (modals), ‘VBZ’ and ‘VB’ (present tense), ‘WRB’ (WH-adverbs), as well as unigrams such as ‘a’ and ‘an’ (indefinites), ‘is’, ‘be’ and ‘has’ (present tense), ‘may’,‘must’, ‘will’ and ‘can’ (modals), ‘if’, ‘whether’, ‘or’, ‘unless’ and ‘where’ (conjunctions) have higher probability for the the principles class, as do general purpose nouns such as ‘person’ and ‘party’. This is intuitive as principles are often stated in present tense, scoped with a modal verb, presented in general terms (thus using indefinites or general nouns such as ‘person’ or ‘party’) and also typically relate more than one clause using conjunctions. On the other hand, the main features that predict facts are the use of past tense (‘VBD’, ‘VBN’,‘was’, ‘were’, ‘had’, ‘concerned’, etc.) and proper names (‘NNP’, ‘Mr’, ‘Mrs’, etc). The principle features that select for the neither class are the use of the first person (‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘judgment-my’), other references that indicate the sentence is about the current case rather than a cited one (‘this’, ‘case-this’, etc), words indicating that the judge is summarising or quoting (‘says’, ‘says-he’, ‘summarised’) and the use of adjectives and non-WH adverbs (‘JJ’ and ‘RB’), which might indicate an opinion being expressed.

Better results may be achieved if the annotation guidelines are redefined to be more specific about what constitutes a fact or principle, for instance, the fact class could be limited only to the sentences whose aim is to introduce facts. Introducing further features to determine the provenance of principles could help with the confusions between principles and neutral.