KHARAGPUR: Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have evolved an Artificial Intelligence-aided method to automate the reading of legal case judgments, the premier institute said in a statement on Friday. The researchers from IIT Kharagpur's Computer Science and Engineering department have developed two deep neural models to understand the rhetorical roles of sentences in a legal case judgment, which could prove phenomenal in India where AI is yet to sufficiently penetrate the legal field. The country uses a Common Law system that prioritises the doctrine of legal precedent over statutory law, and where legal documents are often written in an unstructured way. "Taking 50 judgments from the Supreme Court of India, we segmented these by first labelling sentences with the help of three senior law students from IIT Kharagpur's Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, then performing extensive analysis of the human-assigned labels and developing a high quality gold standard corpus to train the machine to carry out the task," explained research lead Professor Saptarshi Ghosh. Unlike earlier attempts which required substantial human intervention, the neural methods used by Ghosh's team enables automatic learning of the features, given sufficient amount of data, and can be used across multiple legal domains.