Tag: legal prediction

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Immigration Document Classification and Automated Response Generation

Daniel Katz

ABSTRACT: “In this paper, we consider the problem of organizing supporting documents vital to U.S. work visa petitions, as well as responding to Requests For Evidence (RFE) issued by the U.S.~Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Typically, both processes require a significant amount of repetitive manual effort. To reduce the burden of mechanical work, we apply machine learning methods to automate these processes, with humans in the loop to review and edit output for submission. In particular, we use an ensemble of image and text classifiers to categorize supporting documents. We also use a text classifier to automatically identify the types of evidence being requested in an RFE, and used the identified types in conjunction with response templates and extracted fields to assemble draft responses. Empirical results suggest that our approach achieves considerable accuracy while significantly reducing processing time.” Access Via arXiv — To Appear in ICDM 2020 workshop: MLLD-2020

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Predicting United States Policy Outcomes with Random Forests (via arXiv)

Daniel Katz

Interesting paper which follows on to a number of Machine Learning / NLP driven Legislative Prediction or Government Prediction papers. Access the draft of paper from arXiv. 

For more examples, see e.g. the follow papers —

Gerrish SM, Blei DM. “Predicting legislative roll calls from text”. ICML, 2011.

Yano T, Smith NA, Wilkerson JD. “Textual Predictors of Bill Survival in Congressional Committees”. Proc 2012 Conf N Amer Chapter Assoc Comp Linguistics, Human Language Technologies, 2012.

Katz DM, Bommarito MJ, Blackman J. “A general approach for predicting the
behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States”. PLOS One, 2017.

Nay, J. “Predicting and Understanding Law Making with Word Vectors and an Ensemble Model.” PLOS One, 2017.

Waltl, Bernhard Ernst. “Semantic Analysis and Computational Modeling of Legal Documents.” PhD diss., Technische Universität München, 2018.

Davoodi, Maryam, Eric Waltenburg, and Dan Goldwasser. “Understanding the Language of Political Agreement and Disagreement in Legislative Texts.” In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 5358-5368. 2020.

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Legal Data Science Research Group at Bucerius Law School

Daniel Katz

Spent the past few days here in Hamburg working with our multi-institutional scientific research team (Bucerius Law, Max Planck Institute, Chicago Kent Law, Heidelberg Law) … culminating in our presentation to the Bucerius Law Faculty today ! cc: Dirk Hartung Corinna Coupette Janis Beckedorf #legalinnovation #makelawbetter #legaltech #methods #legaldata #science #datascience #networkscience

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Crowdsourcing Accurately and Robustly Predicts Supreme Court Decisions — By Daniel Martin Katz, Michael Bommarito, Josh Blackman – via SSRN)

clsadmin

ABSTRACT:  Scholars have increasingly investigated “crowdsourcing” as an alternative to expert-based judgment or purely data-driven approaches to predicting the future. Under certain conditions, scholars have found that crowd-sourcing can outperform these other approaches. However, despite interest in the topic and a series of successful use cases, relatively few studies have applied empirical model thinking to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of crowdsourcing in real-world contexts. In this paper, we offer three novel contributions. First, we explore a dataset of over 600,000 predictions from over 7,000 participants in a multi-year tournament to predict the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. Second, we develop a comprehensive crowd construction framework that allows for the formal description and application of crowdsourcing to real-world data. Third, we apply this framework to our data to construct more than 275,000 crowd models. We find that in out-of-sample historical simulations, crowdsourcing robustly outperforms the commonly-accepted null model, yielding the highest-known performance for this context at 80.8% case level accuracy. To our knowledge, this dataset and analysis represent one of the largest explorations of recurring human prediction to date, and our results provide additional empirical support for the use of crowdsourcing as a prediction method.  (via SSRN)