RE: Who Owns The Singularity? (was: how shall the singularity take off?) --> legal natural language processing

From: Reason (reason@exratio.com)
Date: Fri Dec 28 2001 - 01:59:39 MST


> Anyway, I was discussing the idea of lawyer-bots with my group's CTO,
> and how we might be able to develop them. The closest thing he had
> heard of was a limited use script, used by some Brazilian judges to
> quickly decide standard traffic cases (accidents, et cetera). I
> proposed, as a first generation, a lawyer's aide that could predict,
> better than lawyers themselves with the tools they currently have, what
> the likely outcome of a case would be, based on the facts available and
> the evidence each side was likely to be able to obtain. (I had to
> justify this in monetary terms somehow, and that seemed an easy path
> from tech to money. Besides, it was an extension of the Brazilian
> script he already knew was working.)
>
> He seemed to like the idea and believed the core tech was feasable, but
> soured on the interface: if it's going to be the hundreds or thousands
> of pull-down menus and similar widgets needed to properly classify a
> case, forget it. I considered free-text entry, say like an advanced
> chatbot, but figured that natural language processing probably is not
> advanced enough for use by lawyers (except those lawyers who are also
> geeks, but that dramatically narrows the target market).
> problem?

I would disagree -- natural language processing is certainly advanced enough
to deal with this sort of thing, if I userstand correctly what you're after.
Anyone on the list care to help me out with some more pertinant links beyond
the general ones below?

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/N/natural_language.html (starting point)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nltk (immature open source project)

http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/ (less relevant, more mature open
source)

Reason
http://www.exratio.com/



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