Blackstone is a spaCy model and library for processing long-form, unstructured legal text. Here, we wrap Blackstone with a performant API layer written in Go. Communication between Blackstone and the API layer happens via gRPC. All of the above has been containerized to facilitate deploying "Blackstone as a Microservice".
You must have Docker installed on your machine and access to the internet. Assuming the above, simply run:
docker-compose up -d
Running the above command starts the underlying Blackstone service as well as the API layer,
which, by default, is accessible at http://localhost:8080. Note, however, as explained below,
the API layer currently does not support any GET requests. So, navigating to the address above
will return a 404-Not Found error. No worries--check out Postman (https://www.postman.com/)
for easy programmatic access.
All of the below routes accept a POST request with a JSON body that includes a "text" property. E.g.,
{
"text": "This is the text you want to process..."
}The NER component of the Blackstone model has been trained to detect the following entity types:
| Ent | Name | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| CASENAME | Case names | e.g. Smith v Jones, In re Jones, In Jones' case |
| CITATION | Citations (unique identifiers for reported and unreported cases) | e.g. (2002) 2 Cr App R 123 |
| INSTRUMENT | Written legal instruments | e.g. Theft Act 1968, European Convention on Human Rights, CPR |
| PROVISION | Unit within a written legal instrument | e.g. section 1, art 2(3) |
| COURT | Court or tribunal | e.g. Court of Appeal, Upper Tribunal |
| JUDGE | References to judges | e.g. Eady J, Lord Bingham of Cornhill |
The API layer will return a JSON response with the following shape:
{
"data": [{"text": "Some identified text", "label": "CASENAME", "labelNumber": 1562316511}, ...]
}
Documentation forthcoming...