Researchers at IIT Kharagpur (IIT KGP) have evolved an artificial intelligence-aided method to automate reading of legal judgements.

A research team at the institute's Department of Computer Science and Engineering has developed two deep neural models to understand the rhetorical roles of sentences in a legal case judgement, an IIT KGP statement said here.

This could be unique in India where the country uses a Common Law system that prioritises the doctrine of legal precedence over statutory law and where legal documents are often written in an unstructured way, a member of the team said.

'Taking 50 judgments from the Supreme Court of India, we have segmented these by first labelling sentences with the help of three senior law students from IIT Kharagpur's Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law,' Saptarshi Ghosh, professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, who is leading the research team, said.

'We then performed extensive analysis of the human- assigned labels, and developed a high quality gold standard corpus to train the machine to carry out the task,' Ghosh said.