Inspiration - Legal documents are always hard to read and understand and this is a bigger issue for especially non-native English speakers. As a gender minority, we have seen how confusing it can be to know the laws that protect us around sexual assault, domestic violence, and divorce. So we wanted to take a single step to support them by creating an inclusive Scottish legal laws simplifier to make sure people from diverse genders and backgrounds, nationalities have equal access and facilitated understanding of the legal system and the rights they possess.
What it does - The user would input text (a paragraph or sentence containing Scottish legal laws) and our algorithm would search through the text for words that match the words in our database of Scottish legal laws with the associated simplified explanation of the provided terminology. Then we output the text with the meanings of the legal laws next to it so it's simplified and easier to understand.
How we built it - We first of all scraped data from a website that contains Scottish legal words and their definitions and created a database. We worked with Python to clean the data and then transformed the column containing values of legal words into lists so it was easier to work with. We implemented the algorithm to create a list of words from the text the user would input. Then we created sublists of all the legal phrases in our database to see if we can find the sublists in the user input text. Whenever there was a match, it created a list of the positions of the legal values in the user input text. We converted the positions to the phrases so we could find their definitions and this was implemented using a dictionary. We created a website on Html, CSS and Javascript to get the data input and this is where we would output the data. We combined it with our python file to create the finished product.
Challenges we ran into - The algorithm was difficult to implement as the legal words weren't just one words sometimes, it was phrases which were harder to search for in the user input text. We also had words which were common to many phases which created problems as it lead to multiple definitions which wasn't correct. Trying to map the legal values from our databases to words in the text to positions and then back to legal values and then their definition was challenging. Combining the python file with html using Javascript was a bit difficult.
Accomplishments that we're proud of -
What we learned
What's next for Scottish Legal Laws Simplifier for Gender Minorities - Next would be to make sure that the definitions are simple and easy to understand as well. We could increase the scope by focusing on more country's laws than just Scotland's. We also want to try and raise more awareness for the laws that protect gender minorities as
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