An Integrated Approach to Enhance Legal Information Retrieval of Sri Lankan Supreme Court Verdicts

Legal professionals and law students often grapple with the arduous task of locating prior Supreme Court rulings for argument preparation and academic study, leading to a laborious and resource-intensive process. This study introduces an innovative approach to streamline the retrieval of legal information from Sri Lankan Supreme Court verdicts. The method centers on developing a Custom Named Entity Recognition (NER) model, boasting a remarkable accuracy exceeding 90%. This model efficiently extracts crucial legal entities from Supreme Court rulings, readily available on the Ministry of Justice's Supreme Court website. The high accuracy ensures precise entity extraction, followed by systematic organization within a dedicated database. Subsequently, a knowledge graph is formed by linking recorded legal entities, reducing information retrieval time to a mere 179 milliseconds, significantly outperforming existing methods. Moreover, a BART summarization model is crafted to generate concise, accurate, and insightful summaries of Supreme Court decisions, boasting an impressive ROGUE1 score of 85%. This approach revolutionizes legal information retrieval, delivering a user-friendly platform that enhances the identification of cases and fosters a deeper understanding, ultimately elevating the quality of legal research and practice.