Enhancing Legal Chatbots To Combat Sexual Violence: A Project Proposal

Introduction
Sexual violence is a widespread issue and has affected millions at the global level. Still, survivors encounter a lot of hurdles in putting their case before a judge to seek justice. Chatbots create an unprecedented chance for CASES of abuse survivors to receive help in a formal, safe, and non-judgmental environment. This study intends to develop a chatbot using AI called "E-Law", which will provide legal help depending on the law and regulations of sexual violence in the United States.

Objectives

The primary objectives of this project are:

1. To design a conversational agent architecture optimized for the legal guidance domain.
2. To develop the chatbot's capability for natural dialog aligned with US laws on sexual violence.
3. To enhance the chatbot's empathy, emotional intelligence, and privacy protections.
4. To evaluate the chatbot's effectiveness through user studies with survivors and legal experts

Literature Review Summary

Recent advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing have enabled new applications of chatbots and conversational agents for legal assistance. As highlighted by Juro (2024) [1], there are now various legal AI chatbots emerging to support tasks like legal research, document review, and client intake. The American Bar Association Journal (2024) [2] profiles how innovators like Tom Martin have combined law and technology to design custom legal chatbots for law firms to boost productivity. However, as noted by Kathrani (2017)

There is a significant opportunity to apply AI advancements to develop chatbots tailored for providing specialized legal advice on sensitive issues like domestic violence and sexual assault. For instance, PR Newswire (2023) [3] reports on a new chatbot powered by D-ID's generative AI to assist victims of domestic violence by gathering evidence safely and anonymously. According to NoCamels (2023) [4], the chatbot named Sophia aims to be the first specialized chatbot to support survivors of domestic abuse globally. However, experts cited point out limitations around Sophia's intelligence,

Similar efforts are being made to leverage AI chatbots for providing personalized legal guidance to survivors of sexual violence in specific countries. As described in IEEE Access, the chatbot LAW-U was developed in Thailand to offer 24/7 legal support to survivors of sexual assault in alignment with regional laws [5]. While it focuses on anonymity and a victim-centered approach, LAW-U is also limited by scripted responses and basic conversational capabilities as per the analysis in the University of Westminster Journal (Kathrani, 2017) [6].

The proposed E-Law chatbot aims to address gaps in legal chatbots by providing personalized assistance tailored to US laws on sexual violence. However, as highlighted in the Research Handbook on the Law of Artificial Intelligence (Barfield & Pagallo, 2020) [7], inherent limitations around current AI natural language capabilities would need to be considered.

Problem Formulation

While chatbots present a promising opportunity for providing specialized legal guidance to survivors of sexual violence, several key challenges need to be addressed:

1. Lack of legal knowledge: Existing chatbots lack comprehensive knowledge of regional laws, processes, and resources related to sexual violence cases.
2. Limited natural language capabilities: Most chatbots rely on simple pattern matching rather than more sophisticated NLP techniques needed for complex legal dialogues.
3. Absence of personalized guidance: Chatbots need to provide responses tailored to factors like user demographics, type of sexual violence, relationship to perpetrator, etc.
4. Lack of empathy and emotional intelligence: Chatbots need to detect user emotions and generate empathetic responses to handle sensitive conversations.
5. Privacy and security concerns: Robust protections are needed to maintain user anonymity and data privacy when discussing confidential legal matters.
6. Evaluation with real-world users: Rigorous testing is required with target users like survivors and legal experts to refine the chatbot and prove its real-world efficacy.

This project aims to address these gaps by developing an intelligent conversational agent called E-Law specifically optimized to provide personalized legal guidance to survivors of sexual violence in alignment with regional laws in the US.

Methodology Overview

The development of E-Law will proceed through the following phases (Figure 1): The development of E-Law will proceed through the following phases:

Knowledge Base Creation: A comprehensive knowledge base will be developed, including vital details on American law, processes, and resources concerning sexual misconduct. With all the relevant statutes, legislations, legal definitions, victim's rights, reporting procedures, and support services accumulated from different states, the chatbot will be able to possess rich legal knowledge.

Conversational Framework Design: The capability of conversation for E-Law would be based on a hybrid architecture based on combining rule-based dialog with machine learning components.

User Persona Modeling: Personalized user guidance will be the core of the E-system with distinct survivor personas and conversation flows based on factors like age, type of sexual violence, relationship with the perpetrator, etc.

Empathetic Response Capabilities: Sentiment analysis would be employed to extract user emotions to return the specific empathetic answers. The functions of memory networks and the affective dialog models will be explored for E-Law to be more emotionally intelligent and sensitive.

Privacy and Security: Robust security features including data encryption, access control, and anonymous networking would be deployed to defend users' privacy. Group identification will limit the disaster information access to only those who are permitted to access it.

Testing and Evaluation: After the E-Law ready-made prototype is developed, user studies will take place by deploying the E-Law and allowing survivors and legal experts to react to it. The evaluation and refinement of a chatbot will be facilitated by using quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback to ensure its reliable performance.

Expected Contributions

The expected outcomes of this project are:

• An intelligent conversational agent capable of providing personalized legal guidance to survivors of sexual violence based on US law.
• Increased accessibility to legal information through a private, secure chatbot interface.
• Empirical evaluation of the chatbot's real-world efficacy in assisting survivors.
• A reusable architecture and methodology for developing AI chatbots for legal guidance applicable globally.

Schedule

The project timeline spanning over 6 months is outlined below:

• Months 1-2: Literature review, requirements gathering
• Months 2-3: Knowledge base creation, system design
• Months 3-4: Prototype implementation
• Months 4-5: Testing and refinement
• Month 6: Evaluation, documentation

Conclusion

The goal of this project is to investigate the opportunity of AI-enabled conversational agents offering legal aid with a trauma-informed approach, which may change according to survivors' needs and the relevant laws in each region. The results could limit access barriers and impact survivors of sexual violence in the world.

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