Translating Justice: A Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval System for Maltese Case Law Documents

In jurisdictions adhering to the Common Law system, previous court judgements inform future rulings based on the Stare Decisis principle. For enhanced accessibility and retrieval of such judgements, we introduced a cross-lingual Legal Information Retrieval system prototype focused on Malta’s small claims tribunal. This system utilises Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to automatically translate Maltese judgement documents into English, enabling dual-language querying. Additionally, it employs Rhetorical Role Labelling (RRL) on sentences within the judgements, allowing for targeted searches based on specific rhetorical roles. Developed without depending on high-end resources or commercial systems, this prototype showcases the potential of AI in advancing legal research tools and making legal documents more accessible, especially for non-native speakers.