POLINE aims at developing an AI-powered pilot tool for the retrieval and analysis of judicial principles of law in the CJEU and national case-law in Value Added Tax (VAT). The tool relies on AI techniques for extracting, clustering and linking judicial principles of law and is embedded in a modular platform, consisting of a Legal Database, Link Visualization and Customised Detection Module. It covers the case-law of the CJEU and the Italian, Swedish and Bulgarian Supreme Courts and will be accessible to judges, other legal practitioners, tax policymakers and taxpayers. The development of the tool will be based on a multidisciplinary approach combining theory and practice of judicial decisionmaking for the study of the concept of “judicial principle of law” and the analysis of the case-law; legal informatics methods for the creation of an ontology of judicial concepts in VAT and training datasets of annotated judicial principles of law; AI, machine learning, and NLP techniques for the automatic extraction of principles, the detection of textual and semantic similarity, and network analysis. The tool will be trialled in 3 online national testing events and disseminated in 3 national demonstration events and 1 final international conference. The pilot tool provides a robust and trustworthy use case of AI technologies for justice. It will provide non-discriminatory and effective access to justice. Through its collection of principles of law and NLP-powered search engine, the tool will assist judges in accessing legal knowledge reducing their work overload. Moreover, through the Customised Detection Test Module, the tool will allow recipients of VAT measures to identify judicial principles of law applied in a specific case and assess whether VAT law is correctly applied. By developing open-access automated techniques of knowledge extraction, the methods developed can be easily reused and expanded to include other fields of law and other legal systems.
