From Research to Practice: Application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to a Real context

By Dr. Atefeh Farzindar

NLP Technologies INC.Montreal, Canada

Agenda

• Presentation of NLP Technologies• Partners• Research and Development (R&D)• NLP’s solutions • Future R&D• Questions

NLP Technologies• To contribute to the improvement of justice thanks

to the use of technologies

• 200 000 judgments per year

• Patent pending technologies

Awards

•  2005  NLP wins the grand prize of the 2005 edition of the prestigious Polytechnic and University of Montreal Innovation & Entrepreneurship Contest.

• 2006-2007 received a research grant from the National Research Council Canada for the innovation.

• 2007-2008 research grant from the PRECARN

Research

• Ph.D. from Sorbonne University and Ph.D. from University of Montreal– Supervised by Professor Mani of the MIT

• Solutions based on 7 years of research and thesis of Dr. Farzindar

Partners

• National Research Council Canada• Centre de Recherche Informatique de

Montréal• Industry Canada• Microsoft• Université de Montréal

The Technology

• Intelligent system for automatic synthesis and summarization of legal information

• Multi agents system based on legal ontology and knowledge:

• Detection of the thematic structure of a legal document

• Identification of the quoted legislations Automatic summarization of legal texts

ServiceExpress

Advantage

• Automatic synthesis and summarization• Search more effective• Provides high quality information• Saves time• Accessible via:– Email– On line service (NLP’s website)

DecisionExpress

• DecisionExpress is the weekly bulletin of new federal court decisions!

• Provides overview of federal court activity for each week

• Provides continuing education for all legal practitioners!

• Be up to date in minutes!

StatisticExpress

• StatisticExpress provides legal intelligence! • An overview of the number of decisions

published during the week, of the number of allowed and dismissed decisions and the number of decisions for every subject.

SearchExpress

• SearchExpress is the intelligent search engine! • Search by country • Search by judge • Search by result • Search by subject • Search by keyword

BiblioExpress

• BiblioExpress gives instant access to: • Legislations • Rules and regulations • Policy manuals • IRB guidelines • International instruments

Future R&D

• Extension of ServiceExpress:– Other legal practices, Tax, Intellectual property– Other courts

• Machine translation

Machine translation of legal text

• The Federal Court and two official languages of Canada

• Publication in two official languages • Translation – Issues

• Takes up to several months for manual translations – Solution

• Able to use automatically translated judgments and summaries

• Once the official translations become available, the Court would replace machine translations by the official ones

• Revision tools

Conclusion

• The first automatic summarization system developed specifically for legal documents

• System implemented in a real-life environment

• Produces summaries for large collections of judgments

• Creating a practical tool to help legal practitioners

Thank you

Questions?