A survey on legal question-answering systems

Many legal professionals think the explosion of information about local, regional, national, and international legislation makes their practice more costly, time-consuming, and error-prone. The two main reasons are that most legislation is usually unstructured, and the tremendous amount and pace with which laws are released causes information overload in their daily tasks. In the case of the legal domain, the research community agrees that a system allowing to generate of automatic responses to legal questions could substantially impact many practical implications in daily activities. The degree of usefulness is such that even a semi-automatic solution could significantly help reduce the workload. This is mainly because a Question-Answering system could automatically process a massive amount of legal resources to answer a question or doubt in seconds. It could save resources in the form of effort, money, and time for many professionals in the legal sector. This work quantitatively and qualitatively survey the existing solutions to meet this challenge.(c) 2023Published by Elsevier Inc.