On Constructing a Knowledge Base of Chinese Criminal Cases

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for building an interpretable knowledge base of Chinese criminal cases by extracting formal representations from judicial documents, enabling legal pattern analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining grammar, dependency parsing, and discourse analysis to formalize Chinese criminal case documents.

Findings

Constructed a formal, interpretable representation of judicial documents.

Enabled landscape analysis of Chinese criminal cases.

Facilitated legal pattern querying for researchers.

Abstract

We are developing a knowledge base over Chinese judicial decision documents to facilitate landscape analyses of Chinese Criminal Cases. We view judicial decision documents as a mixed-granularity semi-structured text where different levels of the text carry different semantic constructs and entailments. We use a combination of context-sensitive grammar, dependency parsing and discourse analysis to extract a formal and interpretable representation of these documents. Our knowledge base is developed by constructing associations between different elements of these documents. The interpretability is contributed in part by our formal representation of the Chinese criminal laws, also as semi-structured documents. The landscape analyses utilize these two representations and enable a law researcher to ask legal pattern analysis queries.