IP Library Granted Patent US 12,333,835
Granted Patent B2
US 12,333,835 · App. 18/059,451 · Granted Jun 17, 2025

Method and apparatus for document analysis and outcome determination

Inventors: Madhavan Seshadri (Jersey City, NJ); Leslie Barrett (Warren, VT)
Assignee: Bloomberg L.P.
G06V30/18057G06N3/084
View Patent ↗
Loading inventors, assignments & file history…
Monitor This Case
Get email alerts when status or documents change.
Order Certified Copies
Most orders are placed with the USPTO same day — all within 24 business hours.
Order via The Patent Place →
Pre-filled with this patent's details
Quick Facts
Patent No.
US 12,333,835
App. No.
18/059,451
Granted
Jun 17, 2025
Kind
B2
Abstract

A system for extracting useful information from the documents associated with various courts' dockets uses a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM)-Attention-conditional random fields (CRF) architecture having a multi-headed output layer producing an outcome and settlement classification. The system includes a BiLSTM layer, an attention layer, a CRF layer, and a sigmoid layer that interact to produce the outcome and settlement classification.

Claims (36)

1. An apparatus comprising:

a sequence processing model layer configured to receive text of a document of a case and output an identification of a sequence of words of the text of the document of the case;

an attention layer configured to receive the output of the sequence processing model layer and output data relating to relationships between the words of the text of the document of the case based on the sequence of words of the text of the document of the case;

a conditional random fields (CRF) layer configured to receive the output of the attention layer and output an identification of an entry level outcome based on the output of the attention layer; and

a sigmoid layer configured to receive the output of the attention layer and output an entry level settlement based on the output of the attention layer.

2. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the sequence processing model layer comprises a plurality of bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) components.

3. The apparatus of claim 2 , wherein each of the plurality of BiLSTM components comprises a forward direction long short-term memory (LSTM) and a backward direction LSTM.

4. The apparatus of claim 3 , wherein each of the plurality of BiLSTM components receives input from one of a plurality of smooth inverse frequency (SIF) embedding units.

5. The apparatus of claim 4 , wherein the plurality of SIF embedding units encodes the text of the document and a plurality of one hot encoded entry type units inputs a vector representation to the plurality of SIF embedding units.

6. The apparatus of claim 5 , wherein each of the plurality of one hot encoded entry type units is configured to receive an entry type and convert the entry type into the vector representation.

7. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the CRF layer comprises a plurality of CRF blocks.

8. The apparatus of claim 7 , wherein each of the plurality of CRF blocks is in communication with a neighboring CRF and the plurality of CRF blocks determine output of the CRF layer.

9. An apparatus comprising:

a BiLSTM layer comprising a plurality of BiLSTM components each of the plurality of BiLSTM components configured to receive a tensor comprising text of a document of a case;

an attention layer comprising a plurality of attention blocks, each attention block configured to receive outputs of the plurality of BiLSTM components, identify relationships between words of the document of the case, and output an output tensor;

a CRF layer comprising a plurality of CRF blocks, each of the plurality of CRF blocks configured to receive output tensors from each of the plurality of attention blocks and identify elements of the output tensors, the plurality of CRF blocks configured to output an entry level outcome based on the elements of the output tensors; and

a sigmoid layer comprising a plurality of sigmoid blocks, each of the plurality of sigmoid blocks configured to receive an output tensor from one of the plurality of attention blocks and output an entry level settlement.

10. The apparatus of claim 9 , wherein each of the plurality of BiLSTM components comprises a forward direction LSTM and a backward direction LSTM.

11. The apparatus of claim 9 , wherein each of the plurality of BiLSTM components receives input from one of a plurality of SIF embedding units.

12. The apparatus of claim 11 , wherein the plurality of SIF embedding units encodes the text of the document and a plurality of one hot encoded entry type units inputs a vector representation to the plurality of SIF embedding units.

13. The apparatus of claim 12 , wherein each of the plurality of one hot encoded entry type units is configured to receive an entry type and convert the entry type into the vector representation.

14. The apparatus of claim 9 , wherein each of the plurality of CRF blocks is in communication with a neighboring one of the plurality of CRF blocks and the plurality of CRF blocks determine output of the CRF layer.

15. A method comprising:

receiving text of a document of a case at a sequence processing model layer;

outputting an identification of a sequence of words of the text of the document of the case from the sequence processing model layer;

receiving the output of the sequence processing model layer at an attention layer;

outputting an identification of relationships between the words of the text of the case based on the sequence of words of the text of the case, from the attention layer;

receiving the output of the attention layer at a CRF layer;

outputting an identification of an entry level outcome from the CRF layer based on the output of the attention layer;

receiving output of the attention layer at a sigmoid layer; and

outputting an entry level settlement based on the output of the sigmoid layer and the attention layer.

16. The method of claim 15 , wherein the sequence processing model layer comprises a plurality of BiLSTM components.

17. The method of claim 16 , wherein each of the plurality of BiLSTM components comprises a forward direction LSTM and a backward direction LSTM.

18. The method of claim 17 , wherein a first of the plurality of BiLSTM components receives an encoded representation from one of the plurality of BiLSTM components and the other plurality of BiLSTM components receive input from one of a plurality of SIF embedding units.

19. The method of claim 18 , wherein the plurality of SIF embedding units encodes the text of the document and a plurality of one hot encoded entry type units inputs a vector representation to the plurality of SIF embedding units.

20. The method of claim 19 , wherein each of the plurality of one hot encoded entry type units is configured to receive an entry type and convert the entry type into the vector representation.

Assignments (2)
ASSIGNMENT OF ASSIGNOR'S INTEREST Recorded Apr 3, 2023
From: SESHADRI, MADHAVAN; BARRETT, LESLIE
To: BLOOMBERG L.P.
Reel/Frame 063199/0840 →
SECURITY INTEREST Recorded Dec 22, 2022
From: BLOOMBERG FINANCE L.P.
To: BANK OF AMERICA, N.A., AS ADMINISTRATIVE AGENT
Reel/Frame 062190/0224 →
Continuity (1)
Related Publication 20240177509A1 · May 30, 2024
References Cited (58)
US 10380236B1 · Ganu · 2019 [cited by examiner]
US 10803387B1 · Setty · 2020 [cited by examiner]
US 10824815B2 · Leibovitz · 2020 [cited by examiner]
US 10956819B2 · Shazeer · 2021 [cited by examiner]
US 11423304B2 · Liu · 2022 [cited by examiner]
US 11568503B2 · Vacek · 2023 [cited by examiner]
US 11663407B2 · Fusco · 2023 [cited by examiner]
US 12050870B2 · Zhang · 2024 [cited by examiner]
US 12079629B2 · Shalev · 2024 [cited by examiner]
US 20170076001A1 · Salas et al. · 2017 [cited by applicant]
US 20190130273A1 · Keskar · 2019 [cited by examiner]
US 20190325088A1 · Dubey · 2019 [cited by examiner]
US 20190385254A1 · Vacek et al. · 2019 [cited by applicant]
US 20200012919A1 · Bathaee · 2020 [cited by applicant]
US 20200081909A1 · Li · 2020 [cited by examiner]
US 20200401938A1 · Etkin · 2020 [cited by examiner]
US 20210142103A1 · Xie et al. · 2021 [cited by applicant]
US 20210174028A1 · Zhong · 2021 [cited by examiner]
US 20210240929A1 · Fei · 2021 [cited by examiner]
US 20210248473A1 · Shazeer · 2021 [cited by examiner]
US 20210334659A1 · Ding · 2021 [cited by examiner]
US 20210366161A1 · Wong · 2021 [cited by examiner]
US 20220138534A1 · Veyseh · 2022 [cited by examiner]
US 20220156862A1 · Rabinowitz et al. · 2022 [cited by applicant]
US 20220221939A1 · Yan · 2022 [cited by examiner]
US 20220343444A1 · Chan et al. · 2022 [cited by applicant]
US 20230033114A1 · Barrow et al. · 2023 [cited by applicant]
US 20230119211A1 · Cheng · 2023 [cited by examiner]
US 20230222318A1 · Lepikhin · 2023 [cited by examiner]
US 20230368500A1 · Ma · 2023 [cited by examiner]
US 20230386646A1 · Tanwani · 2023 [cited by examiner]
US 20240070690A1 · Zhang · 2024 [cited by examiner]
US 20240127046A1 · Lapointe · 2024 [cited by examiner]
US 20240185072A1 · Sakai · 2024 [cited by examiner]
US 20250005327A1 · Liu · 2025 [cited by examiner]
Alammar, “The Illustrated Transformer,” 2018, retrieved from https://jalamar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/, 23 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Arora et al., “A Simple but Tough-to-Beat Baseline for Sentence Embedding,” 2017, 5th International Conference on Learning Representations, pp. 1-16. [cited by applicant]
“Bidirectional LSTM Explained—Papers with Code,” retrieved Aug. 8, 2022, from https://paperswithcode.com/method/bilstm, 4 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Chang et al., “Trouble on the Horizon: Forecasting the Derailment of Online Conversations as they Develop,” 2019, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1909.01362, 12 pgs. [cited by applicant]
“Pyro Documentation,” retrieved Aug. 8, 2022, from https//docs.pyro.ai/en/stable/, 4 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Kementchedjhieva et al., “Dynamic Forecasting of Conversation Derailment,” 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 7915-7919. [cited by applicant]
Kingma et al., “Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes,” 2014, retrieved from https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1312.6114, 14 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Kipf et al., “Variational Graph Auto-Encoders,” 2016, Bayesian Deep Learning (NIPS Workshops 2016), 3 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Lin et al., “Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection,” 2017, International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), pp. 2980-2988. [cited by applicant]
Liu et al., “Forecasting the Presence and Intensity of Hostility on Instagram Using Linguistic and Social Features,” 2018, Proceedings of the Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018), p… [cited by applicant]
“LSTM—PyTorch 1 Documentation,” retrieved Aug. 8, 2022 from https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.nn.LSTM.html, 3 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Mukhoti et al., “Evaluating Bayesian Deep Learning Methods for Semantic Segmentation,” 2018, retrieved from https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1811.12709, 13 pgs. [cited by applicant]
“pytorch-crf—pytorch-crf 0.7.2 documentation,” retrieved on Aug. 8, 2022 from https://pytorch-crf.readthedocs.io/en/stable/, 5 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Raheja et al., “Dialogue Act Classification with Context-Aware Self-Attention,” 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Tec… [cited by applicant]
“Sigmoid—PyTorch 1.13 documentation,” retrieved on Aug. 8, 2022, from https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.nn.Sigmoid.html, 2 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Vacek et al., “Litigation Analytics Case outcomes extracted from US federal court dockets,” 2019, Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2019, pp. 45-54. [cited by applicant]
“Variational Autoencoders—Pyro Tutorials 1.8.3 documentation,” retrieved on Aug. 8, 2022, from https://pyro.ai/examples/vae.html, 12 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Vaswani et al., “Attention Is All You Need,” 2017, 31st Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2017), 11 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Wikipedia—Conditional random field, retrieved on Aug. 8, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_random_field, 6 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Bertalan et al., “Using attention methods to predict judicial outcomes”, arXiv:2207.08823v2, 2022, 31 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Non-Final Office Action mailed Mar. 27, 2025 in connection with U.S. Appl. No. 18/310,689, filed May 2, 2023, 33 pgs. [cited by applicant]
Montelongo et al., “Tasks performed in the legal domain through Deep Learning: A bibliometric review (1987-2020)”, 2020 International Conference on Data Mining Workshops (ICDMW), 2020, pp. 775-781. [cited by applicant]
Non-Final Office Action mailed Apr. 24, 2025, in connection with U.S. Appl. No. 18/310,712, filed May 2, 2023, 39 pgs. [cited by applicant]