LAW-U: Legal Guidance Through Artificial Intelligence Chatbot for Sexual Violence Victims and Survivors

Abstract

Sexual violence is a severe and chronic occurrence around the world that has not been resolved. The stigmatized nature of sexual violence has forced victims and survivors to accept prejudiced accusations cultivated from discriminatory norms when they are never at fault nor responsible for such violations against their sexuality. LAW-U is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot that gives legal guidance to survivors of sexual violence by recommending the most relevant Supreme Court decisions to the survivors' situations. In Thai, "LAW-U" − pronounced similarly to "รออยู ่ " − means "I will wait for you", which signifies the chatbot's unconditional support to the user. 182 Thai Supreme Court cases of sexual violence, relating to Sections 276, 277, 278, and 279 of the Criminal Code, were used to develop Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines for LAW-U. Legal experts then generated mock-up dialogs from Supreme Court decisions which became the conversations used to train LAW-U. The computation of the similarity scores and the calculation of combined percentages of common keywords and keywords' synonyms were completed to increase the model's accuracy. When applying the model to the hold-out testing dataset, the accuracy was 88.89% for an exact match between the user's input and the Supreme Court case − this confirmed that LAW-U was ready for real-life application. LAW-U's unique design hopes to act as a precedent for other works at home and abroad to perpetuate awareness of sexual violence and eliminate any tolerance against these crimes by empowering sexual violence victims and survivors to reaffirm their inherent rights.

A Hybrid Virtual Assistant for Legal Domain Based on Information Retrieval and Knowledge Graphs

“…Acc. = # of Correctly-Answered Questions # of Questions A similar evaluation metric, called exact match, is also leveraged by [9] in evaluating LAW-U's performance. A question is considered to be correctly answered only if the expected answer and the actual answer are the exact match.…”

“…Additionally, they developed a question-answering system tailored for addressing legal questions. The system contains the following modules: document retrieval utilizing Elasticsearch, 9 topic classification employing a neural network, and answer extraction utilizing several question answering models.…”

“…LAW-U is a virtual assistant dedicated to offering legal guidance for victims of sexual abuse in Thailand [9] based on Thailand court judgments. The flow of the VA was devised to gather comprehensive information from the user, aiming to capture all relevant details.…”

“…We compare our methods and techniques with LAW-U [9] and JEC-QA [1] in Table 2. In terms of the use cases, jurisdictions, and data sources, all three VAs differ from one another.…”

Law Chatbot

“…LITERATURE REVIEW In paper [1], LAW-U is an AI chatbot specifically designed to offer legal assistance to survivors of sexual violence by suggesting the most relevant Supreme Court rulings based on their circumstances. The name "LAW-U" in Thai, similar to "I will wait for you," symbolizes the chatbot's unwavering support for users.…”