Legal Inference Platform for Chatbots

Abstract

The student population at Maastricht University is among the most diverse of all European universities. As a result of the language barrier and lack of knowledge, students who rent accommodation in Maastricht and surrounding areas often face confusion in understanding their rights as tenants in the Netherlands, and are thus vulnerable to exploitation by insincere landlords and property owners.

We propose to develop a chatbot that is able to answer questions about a students legal rights in a particular situation and to identify the responsible party when it comes to disputes (financial or otherwise). Machine Learning (and in particular Deep Learning) has become a popular methodology for generating responses to users questions in chatbots. There are two general approaches: 1) selecting from a predefined set of responses and 2) generating the sentences in the response from scratch. We develop a hybrid approach combining attributes from both these methods.