Legal Argument Mining

Annotating arguments in judgments of the European Court of Human Rights

Source: This use-case was kindly contributed by Dr. Ivan Habernal, Trustworthy Human Technologies, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

Identifying, classifying, and analyzing arguments in legal discourse has been a prominent area of research since the inception of the argument mining field.

We designed a new annotation scheme for legal arguments in proceedings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and used the INCEpTION tool to annotate a large corpus of 373 court decisions (2.3M tokens and 15k annotated argument spans).

In doing so, we made use of the following features of the INCEpTION platform:

• Annotation of spans involving multiple annotation layers
• Importing and exporting UIMA CAS annotations with dkpro-cassis
• Utilities for monitoring annotator progress and computing inter-annotator agreement
• Semi-automatic and manual curation of the final dataset

References

• Habernal, I., Faber, D., Recchia, N., Bretthauer, N., Gurevych, I., Spiecker genannt Döhmann, I., Burchard, C. (2022). Mining Legal Arguments in Court Decisions. [arXiv preprint]