Discovering significant topics from legal decisions with selective inference

• Main Author: SOH, Jerrold Tsin Howe
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: domain name disputes; European Court of Human Rights; legal language processing; text-as-data; topic models; Courts; Legal Studies; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/4433; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sol_research/article/6391/viewcontent/Discovering_significant_topics_from_legal_decisions_with_selective_inference_pvoa_cc_by.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We propose and evaluate an automated pipeline for discovering significant topics from legal decision texts by passing features synthesized with topic models through penalized regressions and post-selection significance tests. The method identifies case topics significantly correlated with outcomes, topic-word distributions which can be manually interpreted to gain insights about significant topics, and case-topic weights which can be used to identify representative cases for each topic. We demonstrate the method on a new dataset of domain name disputes and a canonical dataset of European Court of Human Rights violation cases. Topic models based on latent semantic analysis as well as language model embeddings are evaluated. We show that topics derived by the pipeline are consistent with legal doctrines in both areas and can be useful in other related legal analysis tasks. This article is part of the theme issue 'A complexity science approach to law and governance'.