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31 A.I. & L. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/artinl31 and id is 1 raw text is: Artificial Intelligence and Law (2023) 31:1-11 https:I/doi.org/l 0.1007/si 0506-021-09303-6 REVIEW Towards a machine understanding of Malawi legal text Amelia V. Taylor' . Eva Mfutso-Bengo Accepted: 27 September 2021 / Published online: 23 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021 Abstract Legal professionals in Malawi rely on a limited number of textbooks, outdated law reports and inadequate library services. Most documents available are in image form, are un-structured, i.e. contain no useful legal meta-data, summaries, keynotes, and do not support a system of citation that is essential to legal research. While advances in document processing and machine learning have benefited many fields, legal research is still only marginally affected. In this interdisciplinary research, the authors build semi-automatic tools for creating a corpus of Malawi criminal law decisions annotated with legal meta-data, case and law citations. We used this cor- pus to extract legal meta-data, including law and case citations as used in Malawi by employing machine learning tools, spaCy and Gensim LDA. We set the founda- tion for a new methodology for classifying Malawi criminal case law according to the recently introduced International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS). Keywords Legal text - Case citations - Law citations - ICCS classification of crime- Malawi criminal judgments corpus - Machine learning 1 Introduction In Malawi, legal researchers face significant challenges in accessing and searching for relevant information. Legal professionals are not always able to access case law and commentaries through international subscription portals because of the cost involved, and often share documents within chambers or legal practices. This leads to serious issues in ensuring justice, especially for the poor (Gloppen and Kanyon- golo 2007). Case law can often be in hard copy format only, filed away in large repositories that are not accessible to legal practitioners, let alone the public. In E Amelia V. Taylor ataylor@poly.ac.mw Eva Mfutso-Bengo ebengo@poly.ac.mw Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences, Blantyre, Malawi 1 Springer

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