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Constructing A Dataset of Support and Attack Relations in Legal Arguments in Court Judgements using Linguistic Rules

Argumentation mining is a growing area of research and has several interesting practical applications of mining legal arguments. Support and Attack relations are the backbone of any legal argument. However, there is no publicly available dataset of these relations in the context of legal arguments expressed in court judgements. In this paper, we focus on automatically constructing such a dataset of Support and Attack relations between sentences in a court judgment with reasonable accuracy. We propose three sets of rules based on linguistic knowledge and distant supervision to identify such relations from Indian Supreme Court judgments. The first rule set is based on multiple discourse connectors, the second rule set is based on common semantic structures between argumentative sentences in a close neighbourhood, and the third rule set uses the information about the source of the argument. We also explore a BERT-based sentence pair classification model which is trained on this dataset. We release the dataset of 20506 sentence pairs - 10746 Support (precision 77.3%) and 9760 Attack (precision 65.8%). We believe that this dataset and the ideas explored in designing the linguistic rules and will boost the argumentation mining research for legal arguments.