Natural language processing in law - change we need

Abstract

Over the last 40 years, Artificial Intelligence has established itself in the legal domain. A lot of research has been done concerning the modeling of law and legal reasoning. However, one obstacle still remains and has been neglected by the Artificial Intelligence and Law community: the natural language barrier. In this paper, we will give a short overview of the few projects in the legal domain which use natural language processing techniques to achieve their goals. We believe the time has come for computational linguists to actively participate in this field and apply the recent advances in natural language processing to it.