Legal Judgement Prediction for UK Courts

Legal Judgement Prediction (LJP) is the task of automatically predicting the outcome of a court case given only the case document. During the last five years researchers have successfully attempted this task for the supreme courts of three jurisdictions: the European Union, France, and China. Motivation includes the many real world applications including: a prediction system that can be used at the judgement drafting stage, and the identification of the most important words and phrases within a judgement. The aim of our research was to build, for the first time, an LJP model for UK court cases. This required the creation of a labelled data set of UK court judgements and the subsequent application of machine learning models. We evaluated different feature representations and different algorithms. Our best performing model achieved: 69.05% accuracy and 69.02 F1 score. We demonstrate that LJP is a promising area of further research for UK courts by achieving high model performance and the ability to easily extract useful features

[How] Can Pluralist Approaches to Computational Cognitive Modeling of Human Needs and Values Save our Democracies?

In our increasingly digital societies, many companies have business models that perceive users’ (or customers’) personal data as a siloed resource, owned and controlled by the data controller rather than the data subjects. Collecting and processing such a massive amount of personal data could have many negative technical, social and economic consequences, including invading people’s privacy and autonomy. As a result, regulations such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have tried to take steps towards a better implementation of the right to digital privacy. This paper proposes that such legal acts should be accompanied by the development of complementary technical solutions such as Cognitive Personal Assistant Systems to support people to effectively manage their personal data processing on the Internet. Considering the importance and sensitivity of personal data processing, such assistant systems should not only consider their owner’s needs and values, but also be transparent, accountable and controllable. Pluralist approaches in computational cognitive modelling of human needs and values which are not bound to traditional paradigmatic borders such as cognitivism, connectionism, or enactivism, we argue, can create a balance between practicality and usefulness, on the one hand, and transparency, accountability, and controllability, on the other, while supporting and empowering humans in the digital world. Considering the threat to digital privacy as significant to contemporary democracies, the future implementation of such pluralist models could contribute to power-balance, fairness and inclusion in our societies

Microgenesis, immediate experience and visual processes in reading

The concept of microgenesis refers to the development on a brief present-time scale of a percept, a thought, an object of imagination, or an expression. It defines the occurrence of immediate experience as dynamic unfolding and differentiation in which the ‘germ’ of the final experience is already embodied in the early stages of its development. Immediate experience typically concerns the focal experience of an object that is thematized as a ‘figure’ in the global field of consciousness; this can involve a percept, thought, object of imagination, or expression (verbal and/or gestural). Yet, whatever its modality or content, focal experience is postulated to develop and stabilize through dynamic differentiation and unfolding. Such a microgenetic description of immediate experience substantiates a phenomenological and genetic theory of cognition where any process of perception, thought, expression or imagination is primarily a process of genetic differentiation and development, rather than one of detection (of a stimulus array or information), transformation, and integration (of multiple primitive components) as theories of cognitivist kind have contended. My purpose in this essay is to provide an overview of the main constructs of microgenetic theory, to outline its potential avenues of future development in the field of cognitive science, and to illustrate an application of the theory to research, using visual processes in reading as an example

Automatic Detection of Online Jihadist Hate Speech

We have developed a system that automatically detects online jihadist hate speech with over 80% accuracy, by using techniques from Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The system is trained on a corpus of 45,000 subversive Twitter messages collected from October 2014 to December 2016. We present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the jihadist rhetoric in the corpus, examine the network of Twitter users, outline the technical procedure used to train the system, and discuss examples of use.Comment: 31 page

Assessing hyper parameter optimization and speedup for convolutional neural networks

The increased processing power of graphical processing units (GPUs) and the availability of large image datasets has fostered a renewed interest in extracting semantic information from images. Promising results for complex image categorization problems have been achieved using deep learning, with neural networks comprised of many layers. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are one such architecture which provides more opportunities for image classification. Advances in CNN enable the development of training models using large labelled image datasets, but the hyper parameters need to be specified, which is challenging and complex due to the large number of parameters. A substantial amount of computational power and processing time is required to determine the optimal hyper parameters to define a model yielding good results. This article provides a survey of the hyper parameter search and optimization methods for CNN architectures

REALIZING THE GREAT NATION THROUGH CULTURAL LITERACY

Mastery of literacy in all aspects of life become the backbone of the progress of civilization of a nation. It is impossible to become a great nation, if only relying on oral culture in the institutions of learning coloring school. We know that the level of literacy among school less attractive to students. Literacy-based language learning in Indonesia still looks very low compared to developed countries, so that the need for concrete steps to be able to align your learning-based literacy. Initial steps for the beginner students is through learning by writing down what's being heard, either in the form of words, sentences, or paragraphs in accordance with rule writing. Through these activities, students are expected to write according to the ideas and his creativity. Teachers understand that writing is often developed simultaneously and can help cultivate talent and learning interest of students. Needed strategic ways to build the next generation has the knowledge and ability in literacy. The alternative is to improve the quality of human resources in Indonesia. It will certainly be a factor supporting the progress of national education to compete internationally. One of the biggest challenges the nation of Indonesia to realize the nation's mood towards literacy is leaving the oral tradition (orality) to enter the reading tradition of writing (literacy). It was time of cultural literacy should be inculcated from an early age so that children can get to know the reading materials and master the world of writing.There was great a nation if its people cultivate literacy

Detecting Text Formality: A Study of Text Classification Approaches

Formality is an important characteristic of text documents. The automatic detection of the formality level of a text is potentially beneficial for various natural language processing tasks, such as retrieval of texts with a desired formality level, integration in language learning and document editing platforms, or evaluating the desired conversation tone by chatbots. Recently two large-scale datasets were introduced for multiple languages featuring formality annotation. However, they were primarily used for the training of style transfer models. However, detection text formality on its own may also be a useful application. This work proposes the first systematic study of formality detection methods based on current (and more classic) machine learning methods and delivers the best-performing models for public usage. We conducted three types of experiments -- monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual. The study shows the overcome of BiLSTM-based models over transformer-based ones for the formality classification task. We release formality detection models for several languages yielding state of the art results and possessing tested cross-lingual capabilities

PRESERVING VERNACULARS IN INDONESIA: A BILINGUAL VERNACULAR-ENGLISH DICTIONARY APPROACH

English learners in Indonesia learn the English language through the Indonesian language, the language oinstruction in the country's education, despite the fact that 80% of the country's population speakvernaculars as mother tongue. The provision of materials for learning, including bilingual dictionaries,therefore follow this convention while bilingual dictionaries accommodating the learners speakingvernaculars natively are barely provided. This condition insists that every Indonesian must comprehend theIndonesian language first to learn English albeit theories on foreign language learning suggest theotherwise. Apart from this, the use of vernaculars of Indonesia itself tends to decline yet the bilinguadictionaries linking the vernaculars with a widely-known language such as English still lack. This articleelaborates the issues of (1) English vocabulary learning and (2) the maintenance of the vernaculars oIndonesia with discussions about Butzkamm's theory and UNESCO's suggestion on foreign languagelearning, Nation's New General Service List as the core of the English vocabulary, and the application otechnology in the lexicography of bilingual dictionary. Choosing Cirebon dialect of Javanese as an example,this article suggests that the provision of a bilingual dictionary functioning as a reference material foEnglish vocabulary learning yet as a documentation of vernacular maintenance is possible