Artificial intelligence (AI) anticipates outcomes of human rights cases read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1380-artificial-intelligence-ai-anticipates-outcomes-of-human-rights-cases

An artificial intelligence system has correctly predicted the outcomes of hundreds of cases heard at the European Court of Human Rights.

AI is increasingly being used in fields such as journalism, law and accountancy. But, critics said no AI would be able to understand the nuances of a legal case.

Dr. Nikolaos Aletras, who led the study at UCL Computer Science, said, we don’t see AI replacing judges or lawyers, but we think they’d find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes.

The study examined English language data sets for 584 cases relating to torture and degrading treatment (Article 3), fair trials (Article 6), and privacy (Article 8) of the Convention and applied an AI algorithm to find patterns in the text. To prevent bias and mishearing, they selected an equal number of violation and non-violation cases.

It could also be a valuable tool for highlighting which cases are most likely to be violations of the European convention on human rights. An equal number of violation and non-violation cases were chosen for the study.

Dr. Vasileios Lampos, UCL Computer Science, said, we’d test and refine our algorithm using the applications made to the court rather than the published judgements, but without access to that data we rely on the court-published summaries of these submissions.

The most reliable factors for predicting European court of human rights decisions were found to be the language used as well as the topics and circumstances mentioned in the case texts.

By combining the information extracted from the abstract ‘topics’ that the cases cover and ‘circumstances’ across data for all three articles, an accuracy of 79% was achieved.

Lampos said, previous studies have predicted outcomes based on the nature of the crime or the policy position of each judge, so this is the first-time judgments have been predicted using analysis of text prepared by the court. These systems were not yet capable of understanding nuance.