Our AI Project

Research shows that when people search for legal help online, they often struggle to correctly articulate their legal problem.

Our AI project hopes to make it easier to connect people with legal help, and also extends beyond Justice Connect’s own services to strengthen the sector’s ability to develop information and connect with people with the right support.

Our research partners

To deliver this ambitious project, we’ve partnered with Australian academics at the University of Melbourne School of Computing Science who specialise in artificial intelligence. Professor Tim Baldwin, Director of the ARC Centre in Cognitive Computing for Medical Technologies, has been working closely with us to plan and build the AI model.

ARC funding success

Based on the success of our project to date, and its potential to deliver further significant results for both Justice Connect and for research in the field of natural language processing, we have successfully received major funding via an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant.

How we’re doing it: inclusive design

Most AI-driven text classification models are problematically biased, performing substantially worse for under-represented or socially disadvantaged communities. Often language processers are only built using samples from key majority groups. Our project has been intentionally designed to address potential issues experienced by people from marginalised community groups by capturing the voices of different groups across the country.

This project was designed in response to the findings from a range of evaluations we have undertaken internally and externally with our sector peers.

We have actively incorporated recent ethical AI and inclusive technology best practice principles released by the Australian Human Rights Commission. The Human Rights Commission’s principles are focused on eliminating bias in decision-making AI algorithms and ensuring that AI includes human rights principles by design.

While our model is a natural language processing classifier rather than a decision-making algorithm, the risks identified by the Human Rights Commission and the recommended approaches to ameliorate those risks are equally relevant to our project.