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Automatic text summarisation of case law using gate with annie and summa plug-ins


C.T. Aghaunor
G.O. Ekuobase

Abstract

Legal reasoning and judicial verdicts in many legal systems are highly dependent on case law. The ever increasing number of case law make the task of comprehending case law in a legal case cumbersome for legal practitioners; and this invariably stifles their efficiency. Legal reasoning and judicial verdicts will therefore be easier and faster, if case law were in abridged form that preserves their original meaning. This paper used the General Information Extraction System Architecture approach and integrated Natural Language Processing, Annotation, and Information Extraction tools to develop a software system that does automatic extractive text summarisation of Nigeria Supreme Court case law. The summarised case law which were about 20% of their original, were evaluated for semantic preservation and has shown to be 83% reliable.

Keywords: Case law, text summarisation, text engineering, text annotation, text extraction


Journal Identifiers


eISSN: 2467-8821
print ISSN: 0331-8443