Legal Question Answering

Recently we have seen a dramatic increase in interest in automatic question answering (QA) systems. The truth is that the possibility that a computer system may be the one that answers in an exact way the questions formulated by a person is a great scientific and technological advance that may open the door to a multitude of applications both in the business sector and in the academy.

Within these QA systems, one application domain stands out above all others: legal question answering. The reason is that legal professionals are currently saturated by the large amount of legislation at local, regional, national and international levels that is produced daily. With such a production ratio, it becomes extremely difficult to keep track of all the new developments in laws and their application. That is why these QA systems are the perfect tool to manage the day to day of the profession.

We have been working on a solution based on reinforced co-occurrence that is able to answer most legal multiple choice questions with an accuracy of about 70%. This is a great advance since we are one of the first research groups that has opted for Big Data instead of applying neuronal learning models. In the near future, we will be publishing more advances in this sense.