Not robocop, but robojudge? AI learns to rule in human rights cases

An artificial intelligence system designed to predict the outcomes of cases at the European Court of Human Rights would side with the human judges 79 percent of the time. Researchers at University College London and the University of Sheffield in the U.K., and the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S., described the system in a paper published Monday by the Peer Journal of Computer Science. "We formulated a binary classification task where the input of our classifiers is the textual content extracted from a case and the target output is the actual judgment as to whether there has been a violation of an article of the convention of human rights," wrote the paper's authors, Nikolaos Aletras, Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis, Daniel Preo?iuc-Pietro and Vasileios Lampos. The system examined public court documents relating to 584 cases of violations of articles 3 (prohibiting torture), 6 (right to a fair trial) and 8 (respect for private life) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which has been ratified by 47 European countries. The court documents have a distinctive structure, discussing first the procedure by which the case reached the court, the facts and circumstances of the case, relevant law, and the legal arguments applied.