22.
Comparative Analysis with Existing Systems
Legal question-answering systems are becoming increasingly popular in the digital age.
Platforms such as Indian Kanoon, LawRato, and other web-based legal chatbots aim to
simplify access to legal information. However, these systems often depend on constant
internet connectivity and cloud-based models, raising privacy concerns. In contrast, our
offline QA system ensures data security and zero reliance on external APIs.
Key differences include:
- Indian Kanoon: Excellent for retrieving judgments and articles but lacks conversational
query support.
- LawRato: Offers legal consultation, not a QA system. Requires user registration and
internet.
- Offline QA (Proposed): Focuses on fast, private answer retrieval using local models.
The offline system outperforms in environments where network access is limited, such as
rural courts or academic setups.
23. Future Enhancements and Roadmap
Several potential improvements can expand the usability and impact of the current system:
1. Multilingual Support: Enable question answering in Hindi and regional languages using
translation APIs or multilingual transformer models.
2. OCR Integration: Add support for scanned PDFs through tools like Tesseract.
3. GUI-based Version: Replace CLI with a Tkinter or PyQt5 interface for broader usability.
4. Top-K Chunk Merging: Retrieve multiple high-similarity chunks and merge context for
better answer extraction.
5. Mobile App Deployment: Port the logic into a lightweight Android app for law students
and on-field use.
24. Legal Domain Challenges for NLP
Legal NLP faces unique obstacles:
- Ambiguity: Legal language can be complex, formal, and open to interpretation.
- Lengthy References: Articles often refer to other clauses or amendments.
- Precedence Sensitivity: Court judgments rely on precedents, making answer extraction
non-trivial.
- Dynamic Text: The Constitution and legal framework evolve with amendments, requiring
regular updates to data sources.
Handling these challenges requires combining NLP with domain-specific logic and context
tracking capabilities.
25. Custom QA Model Training
To enhance accuracy, a custom-trained model on Indian legal datasets could be developed:
- Dataset Sources: LegalBench, IND-QA, and manually curated questions from law
institutions.
- Fine-Tuning Strategy: Use domain-specific SQuAD-style datasets and models like Legal-
BERT or IndicBERT.
- Training Framework: Utilize HuggingFace’s Trainer API or Haystack’s pipeline for
streamlined retraining.
This custom model can reduce hallucinations and improve relevance of answers, especially
for nuanced legal queries.
26. Model Explainability & Bias Concerns
While transformer models deliver impressive results, they are often black boxes. Legal
applications demand transparency:
- Explainability Tools: Use libraries like transformers-interpret to highlight token attention.
- Bias Risks: Legal models may reflect bias if trained on skewed datasets.
- Mitigation: Implement confidence thresholds and fallback mechanisms for uncertain
predictions.
Future iterations should include confidence scores and display matched context with every
answer to ensure trust.
27. Extended Use-Cases in Indian Judiciary System
The impact of this system extends beyond education and research:
- Courtrooms: Rapid query answering during trial for reference.
- RTI Departments: Auto-respond to queries based on constitutional rights.
- Public Helpdesks: Empower citizens to understand their rights without a lawyer.
- Academic Portals: Enhance law curriculum by adding automated Q&A to legal reading
materials.
Such use-cases align with Digital India’s mission for inclusive legal access.
28. Feedback from Legal Experts & End Users
An informal survey was conducted among law students and faculty:
- Ease of Use: Rated 4.5/5 by 20 participants.
- Answer Relevance: Average accuracy scored at 80% based on test questions.
- Suggestions: Add GUI, citation source, and multilingual queries.
This feedback loop will guide iterative improvement and model retraining in future
versions.
