LAW-U: Legal Guidance Through Artificial Intelligence Chatbot for Sexual Violence Victims and Survivors

• Published in: IEEE access 2021, Vol.9, p.131440-131461
• Main Authors: Socatiyanurak, Vorada, Klangpornkun, Nittayapa, Munthuli, Adirek, Phienphanich, Phongphan, Kovudhikulrungsri, Lalin, Saksakulkunakorn, Nantawat, Chairaungsri, Phonkanok, Tantibundhit, Charturong
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial intelligence; chatbot; Chatbots; Codes; Crime; Cultural differences; Education; Law; Law enforcement; legal artificial intelligence; Legislation; Model accuracy; Natural language processing; Norms; Pandemics; sexual violence; Supreme Court decisions; Survival; Thai sexual violence law; Victims of crime; Violence
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3113172

Sexual violence is a severe and chronic occurrence around the world that has not been resolved. The stigmatized nature of sexual violence has forced victims and survivors to accept prejudiced accusations cultivated from discriminatory norms when they are never at fault nor responsible for such violations against their sexuality. LAW-U is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot that gives legal guidance to survivors of sexual violence by recommending the most relevant Supreme Court decisions to the survivors' situations. In Thai, "LAW-U" − pronounced similarly to " " − means "I will wait for you", which signifies the chatbot's unconditional support to the user. 182 Thai Supreme Court cases of sexual violence, relating to Sections 276, 277, 278, and 279 of the Criminal Code, were used to develop Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines for LAW-U. Legal experts then generated mock-up dialogs from Supreme Court decisions which became the conversations used to train LAW-U. The computation of the similarity scores and the calculation of percentages of common keywords and keywords' synonyms were completed to increase the model's accuracy. When applying the model to the hold-out testing dataset, the accuracy was 88.89% for an exact match between the user's input and the Supreme Court case − this confirmed that LAW-U was ready for real-life application. LAW-U's unique design hopes to act as a precedent for other works at home and abroad to perpetuate awareness of sexual violence and eliminate any tolerance against these crimes by empowering sexual violence victims and survivors to reaffirm their inherent rights.