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Court Order Classification: Substantive vs Non-Substantive Hearings

This repository contains code and resources for automating the classification of court orders into substantive and non-substantive categories using machine learning (ML) models and large language models (LLMs). The project leverages text extraction techniques, natural language processing (NLP), and model-based classification to streamline the analysis of legal documents.

Overview

Court hearings produce numerous orders daily, but not all contribute to resolving a case. Distinguishing between substantive hearings (those advancing case resolution) and non-substantive ones (e.g., adjournments) is critical for analyzing court performance. Manual classification is labor-intensive, so this project automates the process by applying data science techniques to classify hearings based on their textual content.

We have implemented two primary approaches:

  • Machine Learning Classifier (LightGBM): Achieves 89% accuracy with labeled training data.
  • Large Language Model (LLM) Classifier: Achieves 81% accuracy without needing labeled training data, reducing the cost of data preparation.

All code is designed to run on Google Colab, ensuring reproducibility and accessibility.

Features

  • Text Extraction: Extracts text from court order PDFs using pdfplumber and pytesseract (OCR).
  • Preprocessing: Tokenizes, cleans, and normalizes text for further analysis.
  • Machine Learning Models: Trains classifiers such as LightGBM and Naive Bayes on extracted text.
  • Large Language Model (LLM) Integration: Leverages the pre-trained capabilities of LLMs via Ollama for unsupervised classification.
  • Binary Classification: Predicts whether each court order is substantive or non-substantive.

Run the project in Google Colab:

  • All notebooks are available and pre-configured for Colab execution.
  • Simply upload the notebook to Colab or access the shared link to start running the models.

Usage

  1. Text Extraction: Extract text from court order PDFs using the pdfplumber library or OCR with Tesseract.

  2. Preprocessing: Clean and preprocess the text using tokenization, lemmatization, and stopword removal.

  3. Classification:

    • Train the machine learning classifier (LightGBM) using labeled data.
    • Alternatively, use the LLM-based classifier to categorize court orders without the need for labeled training data.

  4. Results:

    • Machine Learning Classifier: 89% accuracy.
    • Large Language Model (LLM) Classifier: 81% accuracy.

Data

The dataset used consists of court orders from various hearings. Each order is classified into two categories:

  • Substantive: Court orders advancing the resolution of a case.
  • Non-Substantive: Orders that are procedural or involve adjournments.

For reproducibility, we use an SQLite database to store the court orders, which can be processed and classified via the scripts provided.

Methodology

  1. Extract PDFs: The orders are stored in an SQLite database as BLOBs. The script retrieves the BLOB data and converts it into text.
  2. Preprocess Text: Text data is cleaned and transformed using tokenization, TF-IDF vectorization, and lemmatization.
  3. Model Training:
    • LightGBM Classifier: Trains using supervised learning on the extracted features.
    • LLM Classifier: Uses pre-trained language models to classify without labeled training data.
  4. Evaluation: Evaluate model performance using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you find a bug or have a feature request, please open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.