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Complex Labelling and Similarity Prediction in Legal Texts: Automatic Analysis of France’s Court of Cassation Rulings

Detecting divergences in the applications of the law (where the same legal text is applied differently by two rulings) is an important task. It is the mission of the French Cour de Cassation. The first step in the detection of divergences is to detect similar cases, which is currently done manually by experts. They rely on summarised versions of the rulings (syntheses and keyword sequences), which are currently produced manually and are not available for all rulings. There is also a high degree of variability in the keyword choices and the level of granularity used. In this article, we therefore aim to provide automatic tools to facilitate the search for similar rulings. We do this by (i) providing automatic keyword sequence generation models, which can be used to improve the coverage of the analysis, and (ii) providing measures of similarity based on the available texts and augmented with predicted keyword sequences. Our experiments show that the predictions improve correlations of automatically obtained similarities against our specially colelcted human judgments of similarity.