Publication | Generating Intelligible Plumitifs Descriptions: Use Case Application with Ethical Considerations

David Beauchemin, Nicolas Garneau, Ève Gaumond, Pierre-Luc Deziel, Richard Khoury, and Luc Lamontagne - professors at the Université de Laval - explore in this publication the ethical issues of access to judicial information.

ABSTRACT 

Plumitifs (dockets) were initially a tool for law clerks. Nowadays, they are used as summaries presenting all the steps of a judicial case. Information concerning parties’ identity, jurisdiction in charge of administering the case, and some information relating to the nature and the course of the preceding are available through plumitifs. They are publicly accessible but barely understandable; they are written using abbreviations and referring to provisions from the Criminal Code of Canada, which makes them hard to reason about. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient multi-source language generation architecture that leverage both the plumitif and the Criminal Code’s content to generate intelligible plumitifs descriptions. It goes without saying that ethical considerations rise with these sensitive documents made readable and available at scale, legitimate concerns that we address in this paper. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first application of plumitifs descriptions generation made available for French speakers along with an ethical discussion about the topic.

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This content has been updated on 22 January 2021 at 16 h 57 min.