Immigration Document Classification and Automated Response Generation

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

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

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.

Legal Data Science Research Group at Bucerius Law School

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