Party Identification of Legal Documents using Co-reference Resolution and Named Entity Recognition

In the field of natural language processing, domain-specific information retrieval using given documents has been a prominent and ongoing research area. Automatic extraction of the legal parties (petitioner and defendant sets) involved in a legal case has a significant impact on the proceedings of legal cases. This is a study proposing a novel way to identify the legal parties in a given legal document. The motivation behind this study is that there are no proper existing systems to accurately identify the legal parties in a legal document. We combined several existing natural language processing annotators to achieve the goal of extracting legal parties in a given court case document. Then, our methodology was evaluated with manually labelled court case paragraphs. The outcomes of the evaluation demonstrate that our system is successful in identifying legal parties.