Advancement of information extraction use in legal documents

Abstract

ABSTRACT The number of legal documents is already huge and growth is occurring at a swift pace; yet, the need to procure information from these documents for various purposes persists. One of the technologies available for this purpose is information extraction (IE), which has been applied widely in different domains to date. However, few research reviews have specifically discussed the development of legal IE. For this reason, it is considered important to conduct a literature review to identify and analyse the research, topics, datasets and methods used in legal IE research. This study used a standard systematic review method as stipulated by the PRISMA guidelines and collected papers from five main databases published between January 1990 and December 2020. A total of 107 articles were selected for inclusion in this review. Legal IE has been employed for various applications to date, but there is a wide range of different conditions, problems, and solutions reported by various studies in applying legal IE in various countries. This study offers a more concrete understanding, a broader perspective and provides an overview of various open problems in this regard so that it can serve as a guide in the development of future legal IE research.