PhD Study : Automated fact checking of legal documents using computational intelligence techniques

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Summary

This PhD is aligned with the vision of Legal Innovation Centre to promote and support the use of technology in legal services aiding social renewal. This has already led to impact on policy & culture with the Chief Lord Justice of Northern Ireland in a recent announcement referring to our Visual Law Project output.

A prospectus is a document by a corporation containing information on the character, nature, and purpose of an issue of shares, debentures, or other corporate Securities that extends an invitation to the public to purchase the securities.  It must contain all material facts relating to the company and its operations so that a prospective investor can make an informed decision as to the merit of the investment. An important aspect of a law firm’s work is the verification of the facts of each prospectus.

Currently, this is an intensive manual task. Given the large volume of data available in many of these prospectuses, the manual validation of facts can become unfeasible. This supports the requirement for research into tools to enable rapid accurate fact checking and contribute to time-savings in legal fact checking [1]. This proposal comes from members of the Legal Innovation Centre at Ulster University which brings together research into the application and impact of new legal technology and opportunities for the education and training of current and future lawyers in essential legal tech skills.

The aim is to extract and verify each fact in these legal texts and to create a broad set of enabling tools to assist legal workers in the verification of relevant facts. Knowledge acquisition rules based on the linguistic treatment of specific aspects of legal documents will be key to improving the results in this task. Additionally, domain knowledge representation can provide an even broader set of possibilities.

This research will create language models for addressing Information Extraction from texts in the legal domain combined with external publicly accessible document silos to verify statements. Automatic fact checking of legal documents allows for improvements in legal information retrieval system effectiveness [2-4]. However, there are still important issues to overcome so that these tools can fully meet their initial demands.

One of these issues is related to the correct identification and representation of legal statements. Previous work is limited by an approach based on text processing without using important relationship descriptions available in the domain knowledge of the legal context and linguistic information. Even with initiatives, whose approach incorporates linguistic aspects in their design, it can be noted, however, that domain knowledge has not been incorporated.

Essential criteria

Applicants should hold, or expect to obtain, a First or Upper Second Class Honours Degree in a subject relevant to the proposed area of study.

We may also consider applications from those who hold equivalent qualifications, for example, a Lower Second Class Honours Degree plus a Master’s Degree with Distinction.

In exceptional circumstances, the University may consider a portfolio of evidence from applicants who have appropriate professional experience which is equivalent to the learning outcomes of an Honours degree in lieu of academic qualifications.

  • Experience using research methods or other approaches relevant to the subject domain

Desirable Criteria

If the University receives a large number of applicants for the project, the following desirable criteria may be applied to shortlist applicants for interview.

  • First Class Honours (1st) Degree
  • Completion of Masters at a level equivalent to commendation or distinction at Ulster
  • Research project completion within taught Masters degree or MRES
  • Practice-based research experience and/or dissemination
  • Work experience relevant to the proposed project
  • Publications - peer-reviewed
  • Use of personal initiative as evidenced by record of work above that normally expected at career stage.

Funding and eligibility

The University offers the following levels of support:

Department for the Economy (DFE)

The scholarship will cover tuition fees at the Home rate and a maintenance allowance of £19,000 (tbc) per annum for three years (subject to satisfactory academic performance).

This scholarship also comes with £900 per annum for three years as a research training support grant (RTSG) allocation to help support the PhD researcher.

  • Candidates with pre-settled or settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme, who also satisfy a three year residency requirement in the UK prior to the start of the course for which a Studentship is held MAY receive a Studentship covering fees and maintenance.
  • Republic of Ireland (ROI) nationals who satisfy three years’ residency in the UK prior to the start of the course MAY receive a Studentship covering fees and maintenance (ROI nationals don’t need to have pre-settled or settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme to qualify).
  • Other non-ROI EU applicants are ‘International’ are not eligible for this source of funding.
  • Applicants who already hold a doctoral degree or who have been registered on a programme of research leading to the award of a doctoral degree on a full-time basis for more than one year (or part-time equivalent) are NOT eligible to apply for an award.

Due consideration should be given to financing your studies. Further information on cost of living

The Doctoral College at Ulster University

Key dates

Submission deadline
Monday 18 February 2019
12:00AM

Interview Date
Mid March 2019

Preferred student start date
September 2019

Applying

Apply Online  

Contact supervisor

Professor Kevin Curran

Other supervisors