How Artificial Intelligence Could Improve Access to Legal Information

When looking for answers to legal questions, people increasingly start their searches online. But what they find isn't always very useful--prompting the law schools at Stanford University and Suffolk University to team up to harness artificial intelligence (AI) to help people identify their specific legal issues. Historically, machines have struggled to understand context in human speech. For example, if someone says, "I'm getting kicked out of my house," most people understand that the person is not being physically kicked but is rather being removed from his or her home--or, to use the legal term, evicted. But machines typically can't understand "kicked out of my house" as "evicted" without being trained through a large number of similar questions.