NLP for the Legal Domain: Challenges and Recent Developments
23 January 2025The field of Law has become an important application domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to the recent proliferation of publicly available legal data, and the socio-economic benefits of mining legal insights. Additionally, the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought forth many applications, questions, and concerns in the legal domain. This talk will discuss some of the challenges in processing of legal text, and some popular research problems, including summarization of long legal documents, identifying relevant statutes from fact descriptions, and developing pre-trained legal language models.
Saptarshi Ghosh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. His research interests include Legal analytics, Natural Language Processing, and Algorithmic bias and fairness. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur, and was a Humboldt Post-doctoral Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany. He has published more than 100 research papers in reputed conferences and journals, and has investigated more than 15 research projects sponsored by the Government of India and various industries. He presently leads a Max Planck Partner Group at IIT Kharagpur, that focuses on topics related to Algorithmic bias and fairness. His works on Law-AI have been awarded at the top Law-AI conferences, including the Best Paper award at JURIX2019 and Best Student Paper Award at ICAIL2021. He regularly publishes his Law-AI research at top conferences including ACL, EMNLP, and SIGIR. He is presently the Section Editor on Legal Information Retrieval for the Artificial Intelligence and Law journal, the most prestigious journal in Law-AI.
