Generating Intelligible Plumitifs Descriptions: Use Case Application with Ethical Considerations

David Beauchemin, Nicolas Garneau, Eve Gaumond, Pierre-Luc Déziel, Richard Khoury, Luc Lamontagne


Abstract
Plumitifs (dockets) were initially a tool for law clerks. Nowadays, they are used as summaries presenting all the steps of a judicial case. Information concerning parties’ identity, jurisdiction in charge of administering the case, and some information relating to the nature and the course of the preceding are available through plumitifs. They are publicly accessible but barely understandable; they are written using abbreviations and referring to provisions from the Criminal Code of Canada, which makes them hard to reason about. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient multi-source language generation architecture that leverages both the plumitif and the Criminal Code’s content to generate intelligible plumitifs descriptions. It goes without saying that ethical considerations rise with these sensitive documents made readable and available at scale, legitimate concerns that we address in this paper. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first application of plumitifs descriptions generation made available for French speakers along with an ethical discussion about the topic.
Anthology ID:
2020.inlg-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Venue:
INLG
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15–21
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.inlg-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
David Beauchemin, Nicolas Garneau, Eve Gaumond, Pierre-Luc Déziel, Richard Khoury, and Luc Lamontagne. 2020. Generating Intelligible Plumitifs Descriptions: Use Case Application with Ethical Considerations. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 15–21, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Intelligible Plumitifs Descriptions: Use Case Application with Ethical Considerations (Beauchemin et al., INLG 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2020.inlg-1.3.pdf
Supplementary attachment:
 2020.inlg-1.3.Supplementary_Attachment.pdf