Teaching machines about family law

The Legal Design Lab has a new addition: Metin Eskili has joined us as our new full-stack programmer. He will be working together on accessibility to justice software that we will be growing and researching in house (in-lab).

Our first big project is in machine learning. That is an exploratory endeavor, that is feeding into a much larger Access to Justice/AI campaign we anticipate to take a few years. We’re seeing what’s possible today, in practice a system to have the ability to recognize unique households of legal problems, or even very fine-grained particular problems.

The tiny initial task we’re focused on is being able to properly classify official, legal or court aid self-help resources. We want to have the ability to state what exact legal problem these distinct guides, forms, FAQs, and timelines refer to. This will help us in our overall project, once we plan to link people more directly to the finest legal resource to meet their own legal issue.

Scraping and Labelling

Metin has assembled a scraper to go through all of the courtroom and statewide legal self-help sites. It is collecting up all of the guides, forms, FAQs, decision trees and other materials which have been printed by judges and legal aid groups, to help people without attorneys undergo court procedures.

All those parts of web pages really are making a corpus of ‘official authorized self explanatory guides’, and that I am labelling. I am starting with high tags of household, housing, immigration, cash, job, and schooling. Then we’ll get to fine-grained categories, like particular kinds of divorce, tragedy, visas, harassment, etc..

Beginning to predict high-level families of problems

At the same time as we’re doing so labelling, we’re training our system learning version — we’re utilizing the library Spacy and also the tool Prodigy — then have the ability to predict that household of problems or specific issue is present in a given paragraph, sentence, or page.

We’re focusing our first training on Family Law. To do this, I have been coaching the version on which ‘seed phrases’ belong to law. This usually means providing a first collection of approximately 20 terms to the machine which would suggest a family law problem might be present. Then the system returns to me a very long list of other conditions that it thinks might also signal law. I check or x off those phrases, to better educate it on ‘seed phrases’.

After we get this list of approximately 500 assessed or x-ed seed phrases, we feed back into the model. It looks over our ‘corpus’ of legal self-help materials, and attempts to classify them. It creates a forecast of that of the self-help materials likely need related to family law or never. Then it presents back to me, and that I go through and check or x away that actually are linked to family law or never.

Check in: Will the device see the family law nonetheless?

Once I finish checking or x-ing off roughly 1500 different entries, to inform the device if the self explanatory information is about Family Law or never, we then check back with the version. We want to see whether it can accurately predict if a given statement indicates a Family Law issue is present or not. This helps us see just how much more training we will need to perform.

Here is our latest check with our version. We enter in a declaration, and ask the model to inform us exactly what the percent probability that a family law problem is present or not.

You are able to observe that it’s very sure — 99% sure — on the majority of the family law problems — when it sees a statement around dissolution, falling out of love with a spouse, adopting a kid, or enrolling a grandkid in college.

Non-family law problems — around landlords, or around human trafficking — the version is really great at stating conclusively: there is around 0 percent chance that this is a family law problem.

The Gray Zone of depicting lawful problems

We’re also interested gray-zone difficulties, such as getting immigration visas for relatives. Lawyers could say it is an immigration law issue, rather than a family law issue. But many lay people we talk to would appear under ‘household’ to try to learn resources. The version provides it a 81% forecast as a family law problem. If we just inquire about getting a green card, it extends down to 69% forecast of law.

Another gray-zone is around health care. As soon as we ask the version about getting medical care for the kid, it provides us a 96 per cent forecast of a family law problem. Lawyers will probably be saying — visit the health law department, you should not be in law. But lay people we’re interviewing are stating if it involves caring for kids, they’d be on the lookout for this to be around family law, also would be phrasing sentences which focus on relatives and situations.

These gray-zone problems (around immigration courses for household members, special education programs for your kids, health care for your kids, debt linked to child care) — point us to why attorneys’ categories and segmentation of problems do not work for people.

That is why another component of our big project is to steer from having people manage to browse attorneys’ categories. Instead of direct people to sites where they must determine where attorneys put the answers they need — we want to have the ability to label the tools and people’s questions with particular problem codes, which means that we are able to better fit them.

As we explore what impactful programs of AI we could develop for access to justice, then we’ll do a lot more work, with some quite exciting partnerships in the pipeline. This exploratory work is helping us teach ourselves about what might be possible, and how we could employ new classifiers or even ontologies in purposeful ways.

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source http://www.millermachine.net/teaching-machines-about-family-law/