Legal Question Answering System using Neural Attention

This year’s COLIEE has two tasks called phases 1 and 2. The phase 1 needs to find the relevant article given a query t2, and the phase 2 needs to answer whether the given query t2 is yes or no according to Japan civil law articles. This paper presents our proposals for the phase 2 task. Two methods are presented. The first goes along the standard method taken by many authors, such that the relevant article t1 is selected by the similarity to the query t2 at the requirement (condition) and the effect (conclusion) descriptions of the articles. The second is our new proposal, in which Neural Networks with attention mechanism are applied to all the civil law articles in deciding the truthness of the query t2. This method takes into account all the articles by properly calculating their weighted sum.