Improving the Preformance of Judicial Precedent Search by Fine-Tuning S-BERT

Abstract

Legal search has been studied by legal experts who possess specialized knowledge, but recently, various researches are being conducted to allow even nonprofessionals to search for law cases. However, the general public who wants to use the legal search service has difficulty searching for relevant precedents due to a lack of understanding of legal terms and structures. In addition, the existing keyword and text mining-based legal search methods have their limits in yielding quality search results for two reasons: they lack information on the context of the judgment, and they fail to discern homonyms and polysemies. As a result, the accuracy of the legal document search results is often unsatisfactory or skeptical. This paper aims to improve the efficacy of the general public's legal search in the Supreme Court precedent and Legal Aid Counseling case database. To this end, we propose a legal document search method that uses the sentence-BERT model. The sentence-BERT model embeds contextual information on precedents and counseling data, which better preserves the integrity of relevant meaning in phrases or sentences. Our initial research has shown that the Sentence-BERT search method yields higher accuracy than the Doc2Vec or TF-IDF search methods. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.