Claim Detection in Judgments of the EU Court of Justice

Mining arguments from text has recently become a hot topic in Artificial Intelligence. The legal domain offers an ideal scenario to apply novel techniques coming from machine learning and natural language processing, addressing this challenging task. Following recent approaches to argumentation mining in juridical documents, this paper presents two distinct contributions. The first one is a novel annotated corpus for argumentation mining in the legal domain, together with a set of annotation guidelines. The second one is the empirical evaluation of a recent machine learning method for claim detection in judgments. The method, which is based on Tree Kernels, has been applied to context-independent claim detection in other genres such as Wikipedia articles and essays. Here we show that this method also provides a useful instrument in the legal domain, especially when used in combination with domain-specific information.