An artificial intelligence algorithm has predicted the outcome of human rights trials with 79 percent accuracy, according to a study published today in PeerJ Computer Science. Developed by researchers from the University College London (UCL), the University of Sheffield, and the University of Pennsylvania, the system is the first of its kind trained solely on case text from a major international court, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). "Our motivation was twofold," co-author Vasileios Lampos of UCL Computer Science told Digital Trends. "It first starts with scientific curiosity." In other words, would it even be possible to create such an AI judge?

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.

An artificial intelligence system has correctly predicted the outcomes of hundreds of cases heard at the European Court of Human Rights, researchers have claimed. The AI predicted the verdicts to an accuracy of 79%, according to the scientists involved. AI is increasingly being used in fields such as journalism, law and accountancy. But critics said no AI would be able to understand the nuances of a legal case. The study, which was conducted by researchers at University College London and the universities of Sheffield and Pennsylvania, does not spell an end to lawyers, the researchers said.