Int. j. inf. tecnol.
(April 2023) 15(4):2273–2282
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-023-01273-z
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
A two‑staged NLP‑based framework for assessing the sentiments
on Indian supreme court judgments
Isha Gupta1 · Indranath Chatterjee2 · Neha Gupta1
Received: 21 December 2022 / Accepted: 11 April 2023 / Published online: 27 April 2023
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Bharati Vidyapeeth’s Institute of Computer Applications and Management 2023
Abstract Topic modeling is a powerful technique for
uncovering hidden patterns in large documents. It can iden-
tify themes that are highly connected and lead to a certain
region while accounting for temporal and spatial complexity.
In addition, sentiment analysis can determine the sentiments
of media articles on various issues. This study proposes a
two-stage natural language processing-based model that
utilizes Latent Dirichlet Allocation to identify critical top-
ics related to each type of legal case or judgment and the
Valence Aware Dictionary Sentiment Reasoner algorithm
to assess people’s sentiments on those topics. By applying
these strategies, this research aims to influence public per-
ception of controversial legal issues. This study is the first
of its kind to use topic modeling and sentiment analysis on
Indian legal documents and paves the way for a better under-
standing of legal documents.
Keywords Sentiment analysis · Topic modeling · Legal
documents · Latent Dirichlet allocation · Valence aware
dictionary sentiment reasoner · Google news feed
1 Introduction
The Internet is a vast repository of data that spans various
fields, including medical, engineering, technology, e-com-
merce, legal, historical, and geographical [1]. However, the
* Isha Gupta
ishaanujgupta@gmail.com
1 Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) was pro-
Faculty of Computer Applications, Manav Rachna
International Institute of Research and Studies,
Faridabad 121003, India
2
Department of Computer Engineering, Tongmyong
University, Busan 48520, South Korea
sheer volume of unstructured data available on the web can
make it challenging to extract meaningful insights from it
[2]. Text mining is a powerful tool for converting unstruc-
tured text into a structured format to identify significant pat-
terns and fresh insights [1, 3].
One useful application of text mining is topic modeling,
which can help identify the general subjects covered by a
large corpus of data [4]. Topic modeling is an unsupervised
technique that discovers hidden patterns from a large amount
of data [6, 7]. It involves clustering groups of words that
semantically represent the same topic, offering the benefit
of saving time and effort [5]. While it does not produce a
summary of the whole document [7], topic modeling out-
puts various topics that are dominant in the document. A
good topic model produces great results that can be eas-
ily inferred by a human. Topic modeling is mainly of three
types [8], with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) being
one of the finest strategies [9]. LDA is a Bayesian form of
Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), in which the distribution
is sampled over a probability simplex, and the model has a
generative procedure [10].
LSA, on the other hand, uses Term Frequency-Inverse
Term Frequency (TF-IDF) to evaluate textual documents
[11]. Both LSA and LDA are based on the distributional
hypothesis, with the primary difference being that LDA sup-
poses the allocation of subjects in a manuscript, and the
allocation of words in the different subjects is Dirichlet dis-
tribution, while LSA does not undertake any distribution,
resulting in more incomprehensible vector submissions of
topics and credentials [12].
posed to resolve the depiction test in LSA by substituting
Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with a probabilistic
model [13]. It shows every record in the TF-IDF matrix
using probability.
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Sentiment analysis (SA) is another important application
of text mining that focuses on analyzing people’s feelings,
sentiments, or attitudes toward something [14, 15]. SA can
be applied to topics, events, products, or organizations, and
it works at three levels [17]: document-level, sentence-level,
and aspect level [18]. Sentiment classification mainly works
on three techniques: supervised learning, unsupervised
learning, and hybrid technique [19], which is a combination
of supervised and unsupervised techniques.
Ensembling SA and topic modeling can help deduce a
document’s importance, as topic modeling can find abstract
topics and related words or patterns from the document, and
these features can help find the sentiment more efficiently.
In this paper, we propose the amalgamation of these two
techniques to evaluate the most effective sentiments related
to the topics found in legal judgments. Legal documents
are critical in all sectors, educational or work-related, and
are prepared by a legal officer or corporate lawyer with the
provision of entering the trial court of law. Legal documents
are often challenging for non-experts to read due to their
use of technical vocabulary, complex syntax and semantics,
and the use of unusual meanings, doublets, and triplets. Fur-
thermore, legal documents tend to be lengthy and technical,
making it essential to develop an automated tool that can
help us understand them better. Topic modeling techniques
can play a pivotal role in developing this automated tool
by identifying the most relevant topics covered in legal
judgments..
Section 1 provides an introduction to the concept of
topic modeling, its significance, and its distinctive features
in comparison to summarization techniques. Furthermore,
this section delves into the relevance of sentiment analy-
sis (SA) within the context of legal documents. Section 2
delves into the prior research conducted on topic modeling
and sentiment analysis, highlighting the pertinent literature
on the topic. Section 3 outlines the proposed methodology
and its two-stage framework, providing a comprehensive
overview of the approach taken. Section 4 elaborates on the
experimental details of the proposed model, including the
methodology employed in the implementation of the frame-
work. Section 5 presents the results of the experiment and
provides a detailed analysis of the outcomes. The discus-
sion will address the implications of the findings and outline
avenues for future research.
2 Related work
Researchers have extensively studied sentiment analysis
(SA) and topic modeling in various domains, and their
importance in different applications has been demonstrated
through numerous studies. In recent literature, a bibliomet-
ric analysis of over 3,710 publications from 1971 to 2018
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Int. j. inf. tecnol. (April 2023) 15(4):2273–2282
in a particular journal was conducted to identify significant
topical elements and to examine publication and reference
patterns, among other things. Using word cloud analysis and
topic modeling, the authors of this study revealed key trends
and topics in the data [16, 17, 20].
Another study investigated the impact of the ongoing pan-
demic on hydro-meteorological disasters, such as floods and
typhoons, in 24 countries [22]. To provide an overview of
the concerns in these countries, the researchers employed
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a computational topic
modeling technique, to extract key terms and topics from
numerous reports and news. This interdisciplinary study
offers insights that can be beneficial for policymakers and
researchers to address the challenges of responding to such
disasters during a pandemic.
Moreover, a different study introduced various topic mod-
eling approaches that can handle the relationship between
topics, changes in topics over time, and the ability to deal
with short messages such as those encountered in virtual
entertainment or sparse message data. The paper also briefly
reviewed the algorithms used to optimize and collect param-
eters in topic modeling, which are crucial for producing
meaningful results, regardless of the approach [23].
In this study, the authors [24] framed the possibilities of
underlying topic modeling for hierarchical exploration and
give a bit-by-bit instructional exercise on the most profi-
cient method to apply it. The application model expanded
on 428,492 surveys of Fortune 500 organizations from the
internet-based stage Glassdoor, on which representatives
can assess associations. The research exhibited how under-
lying topic models permit inductively recognizing themes
that make a difference to representatives and measure their
relationship with workers’ impression of hierarchical cul-
ture. The paper examined the benefits and restrictions of
topic modeling as an exploration strategy and layout how
future examinations can apply the method to concentrate on
hierarchical peculiarities.
The study [25] fostered the embedded topic model, a gen-
erative model of records that weds customary topic models
with word embedding. More explicitly, the models have each
word with a downright circulation whose regular boundary
is the internal item between the word’s implanting and an
inserting of its doled-out point. To fit the model, the authors
created a proficient amortized variation deduction calcula-
tion. The model found interpretable topics even with huge
vocabularies that incorporate interesting words and stop
words.
The authors of the study [26] surveyed the examina-
tion writing by managing proper pre-handling of the text
assortment; satisfactory determination of model boundaries,
including the number of topics to be produced, assessment
of the model’s unwavering quality; and the course of truly
deciphering the subsequent topics. They proposed a system
Int. j. inf. tecnol. (April 2023) 15(4):2273–2282
that moves toward these difficulties. The objective was to
make LDA topic modeling more available to correspondence
specialists and to guarantee consistency with disciplinary
norms. Thus, the research fostered a short involved client
guide for applying LDA topic modeling. The study showed
the worth of the methodology with exact information from
a continuous exploration project.
Access work has been done in the past on SA. There are
many concerns and issues still focused on by many research-
ers. We have tried to review the latest work on SA. One of
the main concerns with SA is the polarization of Twitter sen-
timent. The suggested method [27] entails categorizing the
attitudes using the eight fundamental emotions provided by
Plutchik’s wheel of emotion, which makes the chores more
manageable. Other elements have been applied following the
Rule Based Emotion Classification (RBEM) algorithm to
determine the polarity of messages. The proposed algorithm
has demonstrated reasonable accuracy.
The authors [28] assessed the effectiveness of the vari-
ous episodes of "Mann Ki Baat," a program that the Indian
Prime Minister launched in 2014. Two steps were taken
to complete this. First, the execution of SA on this radio
show’s written episodes. Second, Twitter posts were used
that the general public made about the subjects covered in
the various episodes of this show. The outcomes reveal that
this show has benefited Indian citizens in a variety of ways.
Additionally, our method validated this outcome with a
respectable accuracy of 85.4%.
This study [29] presents a hybrid SA strategy in which
lexicon-based approaches are employed in conjunction with
deep learning models to increase sentiment accuracy. Stud-
ies entail examining the influence of TextBlob on model
classification accuracy in comparison to the original anno-
tations while keeping in mind the possibility of fraudulent
annotations.
The goal of the current study [30] was to evaluate Persian
tweets to assess Iranians’ attitudes toward the COVID-19
vaccination and Iranian attitudes about domestic and for-
eign COVID-19 vaccines. They recognized sentiments of
retrieved tweets using a deep learning SA model based on
CNN-LSTM architecture.
A lot of people also used a combination of topic mod-
eling and SA for research purposes. In this study [31], topic
modeling and classification approaches are used to create a
hybrid model for extracting customer opinions from tweets
of Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC). The
electrical business can use SA to enhance the quality of its
services. Tweets were utilized to generate dominating top-
ics using the LDA topic modeling technique. A prediction
accuracy of 94.8% was achieved by the proposed model.
In a review study [32], a huge dataset of geo-tagged
tweets containing specific catchphrases connecting with
environmental change is dissected utilizing volume
2275
examination. To generate the various themes of discussion,
LDA was used for topic modeling, and Valence Aware Dic-
tionary Sentiment Reasoner (VADER) was used for SA to
determine the broad attitudes and viewpoints contained in
the dataset. These strategies are utilized to investigate the
idea of environmental change conversation between vari-
ous nations over the long run. SA showed that the general
conversation is pessimistic, particularly when clients are
responding to political or outrageous climate occasions.
Topic modeling showed that the various topics of conversa-
tion on environmental change are assorted, yet a few topics
are more common than others.
The authors [33] proposed a cross-planning table meth-
odology because of the area’s prevalence, evaluations, latent
topics, and sentiment. The outcomes show that the consoli-
dated elements of LDA, SVM, evaluations, and cross-map-
pings are helpful for improved execution.
The motivation behind the study [34] was utilizing the
genuine encounters of different clients who have encoun-
tered aircraft. The information gathered was online audits
from 27 carriers, with more than 14,000 surveys. The objec-
tive is what sorts of significant words are in the web-based
audits.
The review study [35] proposed an ontology and LDA
(OLDA) based topic modeling and word implanting
approach for sentiment characterization. The proposed
framework recovers transportation content from interper-
sonal organizations, eliminates unessential substances to
separate significant data, and creates topics and elements
from extricated information utilizing OLDA. AI classifiers
are utilized to assess the proposed word implanting frame-
work. The strategy accomplished an accuracy of 93%, which
showed that the proposed approach is successful for senti-
ment classification.
The study [36] introduced a bibliometric survey of SA
with the premise of an underlying topic modeling strategy
to get a broad outline of the exploration field. The authors
additionally used techniques like relapse investigation, geo-
graphic perception, informal organization examination,
and the Mann-Kendal pattern test. The discoveries gave an
exhaustive comprehension of the patterns and topics regard-
ing SA, which could help in effectively observing future
exploration works and undertakings. This review proposed a
structure for directing a complete bibliometric investigation.
To date, little or no work has been done on legal judg-
ments employing topic modeling. A few related works to
this field are explained. The authors [21] investigated the
use of 56 distinct strategies for analyzing text-based similar-
ity across legal dispute explanations to a dataset of Indian
Supreme Court Cases. Thirty of the 56 diverse tactics are
modifications of current procedures, while the remaining 26
are our suggested ideas. Models such as BERT and Law2Vec
are included in the techniques under consideration. It was
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discovered that more conventional approaches (such as the
TF-IDF and LDA) that rely on a set of terms depiction per-
form better than more advanced setting mindful tactics (such
as BERT and Law2Vec) for determining report level com-
parability. Finally, they picked five of our best-performing
strategies for evaluating resemblance across case reports
based on experimental approval.
The paper [37] utilized LDA topic modeling on a data-
set of 3931 diary articles, and investigated three inquiries:
Which topics inside legitimate examination on AI can be
recognized? When were these topics tended to? Can com-
parable papers be recognized? The topic modeling brings
about a sum of 32 significant subjects. Also, it was found
that legitimate examination of AI expanded as of 2016, with
topics turning out to be more granular and different over the
long run. At last, a correlation of the likeness evaluations
created by the calculation and a human master recommends
that the evaluations frequently match.
The study [38] proposed the Supreme Court classifier, a
framework that applies solutions to the issue of lawful court
attitudes report order. The research compares methodolo-
gies that use traditional AI and NN-based approaches. The
authors also provided a CNN used with pre-prepared word
vectors that outperform the best in class when applied to our
dataset. The Washington University School of Law Supreme
Court Database was used by the reviewers to train and ana-
lyze the framework (SCDB). The greatest framework (word-
2vec + CNN) accomplishes 72.4% accuracy when arranging
the court choices into 15 expansive SCDB classifications
and 31.9% accuracy while grouping amid 279 better-grained
SCDB classifications.
The work [39] portrayed and assessed the utilization of
BERT for topic modeling in authoritative archives. The crea-
tors have zeroed in on a subset of milestone cases from the
US Case law dataset to assess the effect of topic modeling,
through area explicit embedding pre-prepared from LEGAL-
BERT. The study researched various varieties of producing
sentence embedding from the cases.
Table 1 summarized the different work done in the area
of topic modeling by different authors. To the best of our
knowledge, no one has applied topic modeling and SA in the
field of legal documents, especially for Indian judgments.
There are studies or articles available in other domains that
make use of SA and topic modeling as discussed above.
Most of them have exercised Twitter for the application of
topic modeling and SA. This becomes the motivation for
us to work in this field. The pivotal objective of the paper
is to employ topic modeling and SA as a coupled model for
analyzing the legal documents from Indian court judgments.
3 Proposed methodology
In this study, we propose a two-staged NLP framework that
leverages LAD and VADER algorithms to identify top-
ics and sentiments expressed by individuals towards those
topics. Our methodology consists of two stages: Stage I
employs topic modeling to identify topics from large docu-
ments, while Stage II utilizes VADER to extract sentiments
related to a specific topic. The flowchart of our proposed
technique is depicted in Fig. 1.
Stage 1: In Stage 1, we begin by gathering large docu-
ments from diverse sources. These sources can be any writ-
ten or printed materials that contain a substantial amount
of data in a single document. To process the data, we first
convert it into a text file, which undergoes several pre-pro-
cessing procedures such as stopword elimination, tokeniza-
tion (the process of breaking text into tokens), stemming
(the process of returning a word to its root level), and lem-
matization (grouping the inflected forms of a word). Once
pre-processing is complete, the documents are ready for
topic modeling. We utilize the JAVA-based Mallet tool,
LDA, to perform topic modeling. LDA generates a topic-
per-document model and a words-per-topic model by lev-
eraging Dirichlet distributions as the modeling framework.
After applying LDA, we generate clusters of features, where

Table 1  Applications of Topic Modeling

References The technique of Dataset Sample size Objective
topic modeling

[32] LDA Tweets 3,90,016 Inference different topics of discussion of global climate change
[40] LDA Twitter NA Identification of noteworthy topics of Twitter messages
[41] LDA Online review data 23,614 Social media mining for product planning
[42] Nonnegative Cases reported by Los 1,027,168 Classification of crime into discrete categories
matrix factori- Angeles police depart-
zation (NMF) ment
[43] Top2Vec News headlines 100,000 Investigation of COVID-19 News
[44] LDA News 8000 Inferencing connections to the sociological view of culture
[45] LDA Blogs 1,300,000 Discussion on change in climate
[46] LDA Tweets 1,09,076 Analyze scholar’s Twitter usage in CS conferences

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Fig. 1  Flowchart/Framework of the algorithm
each cluster represents a group and is named after an expert
in the field.
Stage 2: In Stage 2, we focus on SA, which involves stud-
ying the sentiments of individuals towards a specific topic.
Here, we use the topics generated from Stage 1 as input. We
extract Google News related to each topic using the Google
News API, which undergoes pre-processing techniques such
as data mining. We then apply VADER to obtain sentiment
scores of news related to each topic. Finally, we analyze the
data using visualization techniques.
4 Experimental setup
The experimental setup for the proposed methodology is
described as follows. The experiments were conducted on
a High-Performance Computing facility that was equipped
with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3945 WX processor
with 12 cores and 64 GB DDR4 Quad channel RAM, along
with an NVIDIA RTX A5000 graphics card that had 24 GB
DDR6 memory. The experiments were implemented using
the Python programming language.
For Stage 1 (Topic Modeling), the dataset comprised 700
legal judgments, downloaded in Portable Document Format
(PDF) files from the Supreme Court of India website, as per
the study conducted [47]. For Stage 2 (News from Google
feed), the Google News API was employed to extract the
2277
news feed, utilizing the topics generated from clusters of
features obtained in Stage 1 as the search key.
The experiment was conducted in two stages. Stage I
aimed to identify the critical topics of legal documents using
topic modeling techniques, while Stage II aimed to evaluate
the sentiments of people based on news articles published
via Google News on the topics identified in Stage I.
4.1 Stage I
• Data Collection: The judgments are downloaded from
the Supreme Court of India website.
• Data Pre-processing: The documents were converted to
text files. These judgments contain common keywords.
Data preprocessing was performed on these text files to
transform the manuscript to lowercase as well as elimi-
nate the stop words, punctuation, and numbers. After
that, text files were tokenized and stemmed.
• Topic Modeling: The model will be trained for topic
modeling for a different number of topics. There is a pre-
requisite while running the LDA that the number of top-
ics should be known in advance. We will train the model
for a different number of topics. We have empirically
run the dataset on a different number of topics from the
[10, 25] with an interval gap of 5. We found that n = 15
performs well on topic modeling. Therefore we have
taken 15 topics in our experiment. Fifteen separate topic
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clusters were generated, with the top correlated words in
each cluster.
4.2 Stage II:
• Web Scrapping: Four topics were randomly selected from
the resultant topics from Stage I. The topics were named
for better clarity of the topics. Using the topics conven-
tion, web scrapping of news related to those topics was
performed using Google News API.
• Data Preprocessing: The preprocessing of the news arti-
cles was essential for the conversion of the sentences into
lowercase, tokenization, stemming, and removal of stop
words.
• Sentiment Polarity: The sentiment polarity of each news
article was computed using the VADER algorithm. The
Vader score falls between -1 (strongly negative) to + 1
(strongly positive). All the articles were divided into
positive(> 0), negative(< 0), and neutral (= 0) categories.
5 Results & discussion
After downloading 700 legal documents from the Supreme
Court of India website in Portable Document Format (PDF)
files, they were converted to text files and pre-processed
using stemming and lemmatization techniques. The result-
ing vocabulary size was 39,828, and the average number of
words per document remained around 2000.
To identify critical topics of legal documents, we applied
topic modeling to these files, selecting 15 topics empiri-
cally. Each topic provided a set of features or words, with
Table 2 indicating these various topics and their associated
features. In general terms, we assigned a name to each topic,
with some being unnamed. Topic 0 contained generalized
features, while the remaining topics were named accord-
ing to their focus. These included writ cases, constitutional
matters, land/property disputes, criminal matters, disaster
management, Indian Penal code matters, Vehicle Act cases,
property-related issues, Insolvency act matters, arbitration

Table 2  Labels and top 20 words for 15 topics from the Proposed LDA topic model
Topic No Top Words Label of Topic

0 [‘provisions’, ‘right’, ‘SCC’, ‘public’, ‘authority’, ‘decision’, ‘person’, ‘power’, ‘time’, ‘state’, ‘sub’, ‘provi- General
sion’, ‘government’, ‘judicial’, ‘provided’, ‘manner’, ‘matter’, ‘necessary’, ‘effect’, ‘article’]
1 [‘high’, ‘learned’, ‘judgment’, ‘said’, ‘filed’, ‘passed’, ‘submitted’, ‘counsel’, ‘civil’, ‘writ’, ‘view’, ‘appel- Writ
lants’, ‘present’, ‘proceedings’, ‘matter’, ‘date’, ‘period’, ‘impugned’, ‘orders’, ‘notice’]
2 [‘state’, ‘article’, ‘constitution’, ‘scheduled’, ‘backward’, ‘commission’, ‘list’, ‘reservation’, ‘election’, ‘com- Constitutional Matters
mittee’, ‘constitutional’, ‘amendment’, ‘classes’, ‘government’, ‘union’, ‘parliament’, ‘members’, ‘power’,
‘judgment’, ‘castes’]
3 [‘land’, ‘building’, ‘government’, ‘project’, ‘development’, ‘plan’, ‘area’, ‘public’, ‘state’, ‘construction’, Land/property dispute
‘authority’, ‘central’, ‘notification’, ‘buildings’, ‘plot’, ‘forest’, ‘use’, ‘proposed’, ‘heritage’, ‘compensation’]
4 [‘accused’, ‘police’, ‘evidence’, ‘prosecution’, ‘witness’, ‘mohmed’, ‘confession’, ‘stated’, ‘body’, ‘examina- Criminal
tion’, ‘deposed’, ‘time’, ‘persons’, ‘criminal’, ‘said’, ‘ali’, ‘victim’, ‘recovered’, ‘taken’, ‘kumar’]
5 [‘government’, ‘state’, ‘submitted’, ‘covid’, ‘persons’, ‘disability’, ‘union’, ‘disabilities’, ‘workers’, ‘national’, Disaster management
‘policy’, ‘disaster’, ‘pandemic’, ‘central’, ‘writ’, ‘special’, ‘children’, ‘scheme’, ‘states’, ‘relief’]
6 [‘accused’, ‘offence’, ‘criminal’, ‘bail’, ‘high’, ‘fir’, ‘police’, ‘offences’, ‘complaint’, ‘investigation’, ‘magis- IPC
trate’, ‘trial’, ‘person’, ‘singh’, ‘code’, ‘crpc’, ‘charge’, ‘sections’, ‘ipc’, ‘proceedings’]
7 [‘bank’, ‘company’, ‘compensation’, ‘alcohol’, ‘commission’, ‘vehicle’, ‘complaint’, ‘insurance’, ‘loss’, ‘acci- Vechile-Related
dent’, ‘consumer’, ‘person’, ‘cheque’, ‘locker’, ‘said’, ‘national’, ‘agreement’, ‘forum’, ‘claim’, ‘liability’]
8 [‘suit’, ‘property’, ‘company’, ‘plaintiff’, ‘decree’, ‘defendant’, ‘possession’, ‘sale’, ‘deed’, ‘filed’, ‘family’, Property-related
‘rule’, ‘land’, ‘parties’, ‘trial’, ‘companies’, ‘tata’, ‘judgment’, ‘civil’, ‘held’]
9 [‘resolution’, ‘corporate’, ‘plan’, ‘debtor’, ‘financial’, ‘creditors’, ‘code’, ‘authority’, ‘adjudicating’, ‘debt’, Insolvency Act
‘nclt’, ‘insolvency’, ‘coc’, ‘creditor’, ‘ibc’, ‘process’, ‘approval’, ‘cirp’, ‘committee’, ‘company’]
10 [‘arbitration’, ‘award’, ‘agreement’, ‘parties’, ‘contract’, ‘tribunal’, ‘arbitral’, ‘arbitrator’, ‘scc’, ‘party’, ‘com- Arbritation
mercial’, ‘dispute’, ‘limitation’, ‘proceedings’, ‘period’, ‘held’, ‘disputes’, ‘judgment’, ‘civil’, ‘foreign’]
11 [‘service’, ‘candidates’, ‘appointment’, ‘rules’, ‘post’, ‘selection’, ‘state’, ‘years’, ‘age’, ‘year’, ‘medical’, Service agreement
‘vacancies’, ‘government’, ‘examination’, ‘rule’, ‘officers’, ‘committee’, ‘college’, ‘high’, ‘list’]
12 [‘accused’, ‘evidence’, ‘deceased’, ‘prosecution’, ‘trial’, ‘singh’, ‘high’, ‘ipc’, ‘witnesses’, ‘state’, ‘appellants’, Criminal
‘injuries’, ‘stated’, ‘persons’, ‘judgment’, ‘police’, ‘scc’, ‘incident’, ‘criminal’, ‘learned’]
13 [‘goods’, ‘tax’, ‘power’, ‘refund’, ‘payment’, ‘customs’, ‘rate’, ‘services’, ‘state’, ‘sale’, ‘input’, ‘import’, ‘itc’, Sales Tax
‘high’, ‘income’, ‘credit’, ‘purchase’, ‘paid’, ‘assesse’, ‘supply’]
14 [‘death’, ‘sentence’, ‘state’, ‘imprisonment’, ‘years’, ‘victim’, ‘offence’, ‘life’, ‘criminal’, ‘accused’, ‘ipc’, Capital Punishment
‘circumstances’, ‘conviction’, ‘scc’, ‘committed’, ‘crime’, ‘evidence’, ‘child’, ‘sexual’, ‘punishment’]

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trials, service agreements, criminal cases, sales tax cases,
and capital punishment in India.
After performing topic modeling on 700 pre-processed
and lemmatized legal documents, correlation tests were
conducted to obtain correlation values of each document
with 15 topics. The boxplot visualization of the various top-
ics with the documents is shown in Fig. 2, which indicates
that features are more dispersed in Topic 1 and Topic 12.
Topic 0 is right skewed, Topic 1 is almost showing normal
distribution, and Topic 12 is skewed to the right with many
outliers outside the whiskers of each topic. Table 3 displays
the maximum and minimum probability values of each topic
with the document. The maximum probability value of 0.965
with document 590 was obtained for topic number 1. Fig-
ure 3 represents the highest association of each topic with
the document number. Table 4 shows the same results as
Table 3.
To extract Google news feed related to four randomly
chosen topics resulting from topic modeling, namely land
or property dispute cases, capital punishment in India,
insolvency and bankruptcy cases, and service-related
cases or matters, web-scrapping was conducted using
Google news API. After extracting the news, VADER was
applied to obtain sentiment values in terms of polarity
value, where ’1’ shows positive sentiments, ’0’ indicates
neutral behavior, and ’-1’ indicates negative sentiments.

Fig. 2  Boxplot visualization of various topics with the documents

Table 3  Documents with the Topic no Max probability value Max probability Min probability value Min probability
highest and lowest probability document No of document No
per topic
0 0.788751323 441 0.00012936 425
1 0.965711919 590 8.21518E-05 586
2 0.740050002 144 1.03875E-06 213
3 0.696587298 80 2.50045E-06 321
4 0.815674705 653 8.81921E-07 65
5 0.826009937 304 1.80191E-06 580
6 0.757856215 223 2.21043E-06 403
7 0.692951989 399 1.38036E-06 403
8 0.770479731 148 1.14694E-06 65
9 0.794709373 117 5.02766E-07 65
10 0.738390115 224 1.96209E-06 580
11 0.761465274 206 1.62472E-06 213
12 0.95425968 481 7.8978E-06 321
13 0.711524975 216 7.24678E-07 65

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Table 4  Comparison table for the Proposed Approach

Paper Techniques Objective

[48] LDA, SA Stock Market Prediction

[32] LDA, SA Global climate change
[49] Topic Modeling, SA Product opportunities
[34] Topic modeling, SA Airline Reviews
[33] LDA, SA Tourist Spots
[50] Topic Modeling, SA Airport service experience
[51] Topic Modeling, SA Online Education in the
COVID-19 Era
Fig. 3  Displaying Top Title Topic-wise
[52] Topic Modeling, SA Bangladesh Airlines

Fig. 4  Graphs representing SA on different topics. a SA of Google news on Land/Property Dispute Cases. b SA of Google news on Capital Pun-
ishment Cases in India. c SA of Google news on Insolvency & Bankruptcy Cases. d SA of Google news on service-related laws in India

Figure 4a indicates that people or media have almost
equal positive and negative sentiments. Figure 4b sug-
gests that news related to capital punishment in India is
more negatively perceived, while Fig. 4c suggests that
news related to insolvency and bankruptcy cases/mat-
ters is more positively perceived. Figure 4d shows that
news related to service-related laws is perceived more
positively.
The analysis of the legal judgments using topic mod-
eling reveals that there are numerous themes of debate,
with some being more prevalent than others. To ascertain
the effectiveness of our proposed methodology, it is worth
noting that no prior studies have attempted to use topic

13
Int. j. inf. tecnol. (April 2023) 15(4):2273–2282
modeling and sentiment analysis in the context of legal
documents or judgments. As such, a comparative analysis
with previous works is not feasible. Nonetheless, Table 4
presents past research that has utilized topic modeling and
sentiment analysis in other domains, demonstrating the
novelty of our approach in the legal domain.
So, the proposed approach is not a quantitative model,
but a qualitative model. So this model is unique in itself
as it is a completely using novel dataset. The model saves
a lot of time as it reduces the need to read large jargon
documents which might be difficult to understand.
6 Conclusion
This paper presents a pioneering study that investigates
the application of topic modeling and sentiment analysis
in Indian legal documents. Our proposed methodology
effectively extracts topics and identifies related senti-
ments in lengthy legal documents, with promising results
that have the potential to enhance users’ ability to compre-
hend legal judgments and identify relevant sentiments in
a shorter amount of time. While this area has been largely
unexplored by previous studies, our approach provides a
valuable contribution to the field. However, there are still
significant challenges that need to be addressed, such as the
lack of optimized topic models for legal data. Overall, this
study represents a significant milestone in the exploration of
topic modeling and sentiment analysis in Indian legal docu-
ments, providing valuable insights to legal professionals and
researchers.
Authors contributions All the authors of this manuscript contrib-
uted to the conceptual framework and design of the study. Material
preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by IG and
IC. IG wrote the first draft of the manuscript. IC and NG have edited
and revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final
manuscript.
Funding The authors declare that no funding has been received to
perform this study.
Data availability The authors declare that this study is fully repro-
ducible, and the data used in this research work may be shared with
readers at their request.
Declarations
Conflict of interest The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Consent For publication The authors give their full consent for the
publication of identifiable details, which can include a photograph(s)
and/or details within the text (“Material”) to be published in this
esteemed journal in the form of an article.
2281
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