Sebis Research News

We are happy to announce that our survey about document automation tools for the legal domain has been published.

The survey evaluates 13 document automation tools in accordance with requirements, which were identified with respect to the legal domain.

Please find the result of our survey here.

We would like to sincerely thank the 13 vendors who participated in our study and granted us access to their tools for conducting the study.

The sebis chair has been researching the utilization of artificial intelligence in order to improve legal research for several years. As a part of this effort, a joint research project with the Haufe Group has been established. In particular the semantic text matching problem as well as semantic search technologies were explored. More information about this research is also available here. Most recently, our industry partner was able to successfully transfer the gained knowledge and technologies into its own business. 

As a reuslt, Haufe Group published an interesting article about our project and findings. The article is available at https://www.buchreport.de/news/mit-kuenstlicher-intelligenz-zum-besseren-suchergebnis/.

On Thursday, January 24th, 2019, at 6:00 pm, the Seitz Weckbach Fackler & Partner law firm hosted an event organized by the Augsburg Law Society on Smart Contracts and Blockchain - a Huge hype or an actual disruptive technology? At the lecture evening, Prof Dr. Hans Grigoleit and Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes gave a talk on the diverse technical and legal implications of smart contracts and blockchain from the perspective of computer science on the one hand, and the lawyers perspective on the other.

The presentation slides of Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes talk are available here for download.

The team of Florian Matthes, consisting of Ingo Glaser, and Elena Scepankova, has published their recent results on Classifying Semantic Types of Legal Sentences: Portability of Machine Learning Models at the 31st international conference on legal knowledge and information systems (Jurix). The paper is going to be presented at the conference from 12-14 December 2018, Netherlands, Groningen.

More details can be found here.

The growing amount of textual data in the legal domain leads to a demand for better text analysis tools adapted to legal domain specific use cases. Semantic Text Matching (STM) is the general problem of linking text fragments of one or more document types. The STM problem is present in many legal document analysis tasks, such as argumentation mining. A common solution approach to the STM problem is to use text similarity measures to identify matching text fragments. In this paper, we recapitulate the STM problem and a use case in German tenancy law, where we match tenancy contract clauses and legal comment chapters. We propose an approach similar to local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) to better understand the behavior of text similarity measures like TFIDF and word embeddings. We call this approach eXplainable Semantic Text Matching (XSTM).