Many legal professionals think that the explosion of information about local, regional, national, and international legislation makes their practice more costly, time-consuming, and even error-prone. The two main reasons for this are that most legislation is usually unstructured, and the tremendous amount and pace with which laws are released causes information overload in their daily tasks. In the case of the legal domain, the research community agrees that a system allowing to generate automatic responses to legal questions could substantially impact many practical implications in daily activities. The degree of usefulness is such that even a semi-automatic solution could significantly help to reduce the workload to be faced. This is mainly because a Question Answering system could be able to automatically process a massive amount of legal resources to answer a question or doubt in seconds, which means that it could save resources in the form of effort, money, and time to many professionals in the legal sector. In this work, we quantitatively and qualitatively survey the solutions that currently exist to meet this challenge.
翻译:许多法律专业人员认为,关于地方、区域、国家和国际立法的信息激增,使得其做法成本更高、耗时甚多,甚至容易出错,其两个主要原因是,大多数立法通常没有结构,法律发布的数量和速度之大,造成其日常工作的信息超负荷。在法律领域,研究界同意,允许自动答复法律问题的系统可大大影响日常活动的许多实际影响。实用性之大,甚至半自动解决办法也能大大有助于减少所面临的工作量。这主要是因为问答系统能够自动处理大量的法律资源,在秒内回答一个问题或疑问,这意味着它可以节省资源,以努力、金钱和时间的形式为法律部门的许多专业人员节省资源。在这项工作中,我们从数量上和质上调查目前存在的应对这一挑战的解决办法。