Text-mining for Lawyers: How Machine Learning Techniques Can Advance our Understanding of Legal Discourse

Abstract

Many questions facing legal scholars and practitioners can only be answered by analysing and interrogating large collections of legal documents: statutes, treaties, judicial decisions and law review articles. I survey a range of novel techniques in machine learning and natural language processing – including topic modelling, word embeddings and transfer learning – that can be applied to the large-scale investigation of legal texts.

Keywords: law; natural language processing; text-mining; machine learning; supervised methods; unsupervised methods