Improving Access to Justice with Legal Chatbots

Abstract

On average, one in three Canadians will be affected by a legal problem over a three-year period. Unfortunately, whether it is legal representation or legal advice, the very high cost of these services excludes disadvantaged and most vulnerable people, forcing them to represent themselves. For these people, accessing legal information is therefore critical. In this work, we attempt to tackle this problem by embedding legal data in a conversational interface. We introduce two dialog systems (chatbots) created to provide legal information. The first one, based on data from the Government of Canada, deals with immigration issues, while the second one informs bank employees about legal issues related to their job tasks. Both chatbots rely on various representations and classification algorithms, from mature techniques to novel advances in the field. The chatbot dedicated to immigration issues is shared with the research community as an open resource project.

Keywords

• chatbot
• information retrieval
• natural language processing
• question answering system
• dialog system