Professor Ben C.M. Kao of the Department of Computer Science
The HKU AI Lawyer, an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted sentencing predictor for the offense of trafficking in dangerous drugs in Hong Kong, is a joint project between Department of Computer Science and the Faculty of Law. The project was led by Professor Ben C.M. Kao of the Department of Computer Science and Professor Anne Cheung of the Faculty of Law and was supported by 8 team members from computer science and law.
The sentencing predictor is the first tool developed by the team under the broader goal of developing legal technology (LegalTech). A special focus of the research is to apply the latest AI and information retrieval technology to assist legal professionals in handling, processing, and discovering legal knowledge that is embedded in various legal documents such as court judgments. The core of the predictor was implemented by two computer science PhD students, Mr Gavin Yuan and Mr Kevin Wu. Two machine learning models were built that were trained using thousands of historical court judgments. One model applies natural language processing technique to perform named-entity recognition on court judgments of drug trafficking cases. The machine was trained to comprehend judgments to identify 82 salient facts in each of them, such as drug type, drug weight, and various mitigating and aggravating factors that would affect the sentencing handed down by judges. Another model integrates legal domain knowledge of sentencing principles and guidelines with patterns discovered from drug trafficking judgments. By studying thousands of cases, the machine model was able to learn how judges generally adjust penalty due to various mitigating and aggravating factors. The machine also remembers the details of all historical judgments. Given a new case, the machine can intelligently identify the most similar precedents and present those as relevant references. The tool is open to public and is being deployed by The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups in their youth crime prevention and education programs.
For more details about the HKU AI Lawyer, please visit:
https://www.hku.hk/press/news_detail_22840.html