Kanoon Sarathi - A Multilingual Portal for the Indian Judicial System
The Background Story The Digital India Mission launched by the Government of India in 2015 served as a beneficiary for many other schemes or initiatives and transformed the country as a whole. The legal industry is one of the major drivers for the stability of the society and the economy and thus it must be digitized. The major challenges observed in this process are unstructured and vague representation of the documents, legal jargon, inadequate signposting of key information, multiple interpretations of the information, only a subset of the entire Acts and Laws is relevant in context, and non-adaptability of the stakeholders for the digital shift. The COVID-19 pandemic had hit the world severely and accelerated the transition to the virtual world at an unprecedented rate. The court cases started to be heard through video conferencing, lawyers started doing online consultations, and the law firms started connecting to their clients through social media.
As of May 2022, over 4.7 crore cases are pending in different Indian courts (Data: The Hindu). Artificial Intelligence (AI) can go far beyond just automation in assisting the judges and lawyers. The theory of an AI agent (i.e., becoming better and better, the more it is practiced and the more data it is fed) matches with the way of working of a law system. AI-powered legal automation will be commonplace in the next five years to come. Artificial Intelligence can further aid the litigants, lawyers, and the judiciary through better document representation, document classification, discovering relevant documents, Online Dispute Resolution, Recovering Case Histories, Document Analysis, Legal Search, Strategizing the Case, Legal Summarization, Judgment Prediction, and much more.
The Government of India has taken active efforts to present all laws/statutes along with their amendments at indiacode.nic.in and all court judgments at judis.nic.in. Some noteworthy developments of digitization and the application of AI to the Indian Judicial System are LIMBS, E-Courts, SUVAAS, SCI-Interact, SUPACE, SPOTDRAFT, CASEMINE, CASEIQ, NEARLAW, and PRACTICELEAGUE.
Kanoon Sarathi:
The two camps of AI, symbolic approaches (rule-based) and the sub-symbolic (statistical and machine learning) approaches, have their own say and their own pros and cons. The hybrid of the two camps, called the neuro-symbolic AI is the way forward to Artificial General Intelligence. Kanoon Sarathi is built upon this hybrid approach where the human cognition meets the standalone Statistical AI capabilities. Kanoon Sarathi is a multilingual portal for the Indian Judicial System that offers a platform for legal data curation, management, and sharing. This knowledge management platform will facilitate the interpretability and explainability of the decision support and the reasoning procedures applied. Currently Kanoon Sarthi focuses upon three use cases:
1. Open data access for legal domain experts as well as to the common public to improve their involvement in understanding the judicial system in the form of Acts and Laws, Court Cases information, and so on
2. Finding similar cases based upon the context present in the court case documents.
3. Legal judgment prediction to help the judges decide the acceptance ratio of the appeal/petition with explainability.
Simply putting-
“We are helping various people to give relevant insight from their perspective into the law related documents that are generating today.”
The Team:
Dr. Sarika Jain - Assistant Professor, National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra is the Principal Investigator for this project. Her team includes one JRF, Ms Pooja Harde and several interns, namely Sudipto Ghosh, Dev Nirwal, Deepak Jaglan, Ankush Bisht, Abhinav Dubey, Tejas Mahajan, and Chirag Garg.
Milestones Achieved:
1. Presented and Under Publication with CEUR Workshop Proceedings (Scopus Indexed)
Title: Constructing a Knowledge Graph from Indian Legal Domain Corpus
Venue: International Workshop On Knowledge Graph Generation From Text (Text2KG) Co-located with the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2022)
Team: Sarika Jain, Sudipto Ghosh, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Abhinav Dubey, Pooja Harde, Ankush Bisht
2. Presented and Under Publication with Springer LNEE Series (Scopus Indexed)
Title: Investigating the Similarity of Court Decisions
Venue: International Health Informatics Conference (IHIC 2022)
Team: Sarika Jain, Deepak Jaglan, Kapil Gupta
3. Presented and Under Publication with Springer LNEE Series (Scopus Indexed)
Title: NyOn: A Multilingual Modular Legal Ontology for Representing Court Judgements
Venue: The International Semantic Intelligence Conference ISIC 2022
Team: Sarika Jain, Pooja Harde, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya