People in organizations, society, and institutions communicate via natural language. Typically, large amounts of unstructured information are stored in text documents. This is especially true for the legal domain, where knowledge is codified in laws, judgments, commentaries, contract, and other documents. It is very difficult for machines to query relevant content fast and extract structured information from such texts. While other parts of our life have already been disrupted by the changes brought by the digital revolution, the sphere of law and jurisprudence has been withstanding these changes for a long time and is only slowly taking advantage of new technologies. Tools supporting legal professionals in their daily work are often summarized under the term LegalTech.
The research at our chair focuses on the analysis of German legal texts with natural language processing techniques. It is our goal to build interdisciplinary teams, connecting scientists and practitioners from both, computer science and legal sciences in order to support legal professionals but also to empower consumers in digitized markets. Furthermore, we are examining the implications of blockchain technology on the legal domain and applications of natural language processing and generation to other domains like health, finance, and software engineering.
