United Arab Emirates

Supervised training of existing deep learning models for sequence labeling relies on large scale labeled datasets. Such datasets are generally created with crowd-source labeling. However, crowd-source labeling for tasks of sequence labeling can be expensive and time-consuming. Further, crowd-source labeling by external annotators may not be appropriate for data that contains user private information. Considering the above limitations of crowd-source labeling, we study interactive sequence labeling that allows training directly with the user feedback, which alleviates the annotation cost and maintains the user privacy. We identify two bias, namely, context bias and feedback bias, by formulating interactive sequence labeling via a Structural Causal Model (SCM). To alleviate the context and feedback bias based on the SCM, we identify the frequent context tokens as confounders in the backdoor adjustment and further propose an entropy-based modulation that is inspired by information theory. entities more sample-efficiently. With extensive experiments, we validate that our approach can effectively alleviate the biases and our models can be efficiently learnt  with the user feedback.

EMNLP 2022

Context-aware Information-theoretic Causal De-biasing for Interactive Sequence Labeling

interactive learning

sequence labeling

workshop paper

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

This paper proposes StuBot, a text-based conversational agent that provides adaptive feedback for learning by teaching. StuBot first asks the users to teach the learning content by summarizing and explaining it in their own words. After the users inputted the explanation text for teaching, StuBot uses a machine reading comprehension (MRC) engine to provide adaptive feedback with further questions about the insufficient parts of the explanation text. We conducted a within-subject study to evaluate the effectiveness of adaptive feedback by StuBot. Both the quantitative and qualitative results showed that learning by teaching with adaptive feedback can improve learning performance, immersion, and overall experience.

StuBot: Learning by Teaching a Conversational Agent Through Machine Reading Comprehension

In this article, we explore the potential and challenges of applying transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) and statistical methods to a particularly challenging, yet highly important and largely uncharted domain: normative discussions in tax law research. On our conviction, the role of NLP in this essentially contested territory is to make explicit implicit normative assumptions, and to foster debates across ideological divides. To this goal, we propose the first steps towards a method that automatically labels normative statements in tax law research, and that suggests the normative background of these statements. Our results are encouraging, but it is clear that there is still room for improvement.

On What it Means to Pay Your Fair Share: Towards Automatically Mapping Different Conceptions of Tax Justice in Legal Research Literature

Creating balanced labeled textual corpora for complex tasks, like legal analysis, is a challenging and expensive process that often requires the collaboration of domain experts. To address this problem, we propose a data augmentation method based on the combination of GloVe word embeddings and the WordNet ontology. We present an example of application in the legal domain, specifically on decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Our evaluation with human experts confirms that our method is more robust than the alternatives.

Combining WordNet and Word Embeddings in Data Augmentation for Legal Texts

We propose a 'legal approach' to hate speech detection by operationalization of the decision as to whether a post is subject to criminal law into an NLP task. Comparing existing regulatory regimes for hate speech, we base our investigation on the European Union's framework as it provides a widely applicable legal minimum standard. Accurately deciding whether a post is punishable or not usually requires legal education. We show that, by breaking the legal assessment down into a series of simpler sub-decisions, even laypersons can annotate consistently. Based on a newly annotated dataset, our experiments show that directly learning an automated model of punishable content is challenging. However, learning the two sub-tasks of 'target group' and 'targeting conduct' instead of a holistic, end-to-end approach to the legal assessment yields better results. Overall, our method also provides decisions that are more transparent than those of end-to-end models, which is a crucial point in legal decision-making.

A Legal Approach to Hate Speech – Operationalizing the EU's Legal Framework against the Expression of Hatred as an NLP Task

Verbose and complicated legal terminology in online service terms and conditions (T\&C) means that users typically don't read these documents before accepting the terms of such unilateral service contracts. With such services becoming part of mainstream digital life, highlighting Terms of Service (ToS) clauses that impact on the collection and use of user data and privacy are important concerns. Advances in text summarization can help to create informative and concise summaries of the terms, but existing approaches geared towards news and microblogging corpora are not directly applicable to the ToS domain, which is hindered by a lack of T\&C-relevant resources for training and evaluation. This paper presents a ToS model, developing a hybrid extractive-classifier-abstractive pipeline that highlights the privacy and data collection/use-related sections in a ToS document and paraphrases these into concise and informative sentences. Relying on significantly less training data (4313 training pairs) than previous representative works (287,226 pairs), our model outperforms extractive baselines by at least 50\% in ROUGE-1 score and 54\% in METEOR score. The paper also contributes to existing community efforts by curating a dataset of online service T\&C, through a developed web scraping tool.

Privacy Pitfalls of Online Service Terms and Conditions: a Hybrid Approach for Classification and Summarization

With the legal sector embracing digitization, the increasing availability of information has led to a need for systems that can automatically summarize legal documents. Most existing research on legal text summarization has so far focused on extractive models, which can result in awkward summaries, as sentences in legal documents can be very long and detailed. In this study, we apply two abstractive summarization models on a Dutch legal domain dataset. The results show that existing models transfer quite well across domains and languages: the ROUGE scores of our experiments are comparable to state-of-the-art studies on English news article texts. Examining one of the models showed the capability of rewriting long legal sentences to much shorter ones, using mostly vocabulary from the source document. Human evaluation shows that for both models hand-made summaries are still perceived as more relevant and readable, and automatic summaries do not always capture elements such as background, considerations and judgement. Still, generated summaries are valuable if only a keyword summary or no summary at all is present.

Abstractive Summarization of Dutch Court Verdicts Using Sequence-to-sequence Models

Legalese can often be filled with verbose domain-specific jargon which can make it challenging to understand and use for non-experts. Creating succinct summaries of legal documents often makes it easier for user comprehension. However, obtaining labeled data for every domain of legal text is challenging, which makes cross-domain transferability of text generation models for legal text, an important area of research. In this paper, we explore the ability of existing state-of-the-art T5 \& BART-based summarization models to transfer across legal domains. We leverage publicly available datasets across four domains for this task, one of which is a new resource for summarizing privacy policies, that we curate and release for academic research. Our experiments demonstrate the low cross-domain transferability of these models, while also highlighting the benefits of combining different domains. Further, we compare the effectiveness of standard metrics for this task and illustrate the vast differences in their performance.

Towards Cross-Domain Transferability of Text Generation Models for Legal Text

Seeking legal advice is often expensive. Recent advancements in machine learning for solving complex problems can be leveraged to help make legal services more accessible to the public. However, real-life applications encounter significant challenges. State-of-the-art language models are growing increasingly large, making parameter-efficient learning increasingly important. Unfortunately, parameter-efficient methods perform poorly with small amounts of data, which are common in the legal domain (where data labelling costs are high). To address these challenges, we propose parameter-efficient legal domain adaptation, which uses vast unsupervised legal data from public legal forums to perform legal pre-training. This method exceeds or matches the fewshot performance of existing models such as LEGAL-BERT on various legal tasks while tuning only approximately 0.1\% of model parameters. Additionally, we show that our method can achieve calibration comparable to existing methods across several tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the first to explore parameter-efficient methods of tuning language models in the legal domain.

Parameter-Efficient Legal Domain Adaptation

Legal practitioners often face a vast amount of documents. Lawyers, for instance, search for appropriate precedents favorable to their clients, while the number of legal precedents is ever-growing. Although legal search engines can assist finding individual target documents and narrowing down the number of candidates, retrieved information is often presented as unstructured text and users have to examine each document thoroughly which could lead to information overloading. This also makes their statistical analysis challenging. Here, we present an end-to-end information extraction (IE) system for legal documents. By formulating IE as a generation task, our system can be easily applied to various tasks without domain-specific engineering effort. The experimental results of four IE tasks on Korean precedents shows that our IE system can achieve competent scores (-2.3 on average) compared to the rule-based baseline with as few as 50 training examples per task and higher score (+5.4 on average) with 200 examples. Finally, our statistical analysis on two case categories — drunk driving and fraud — with 35k precedents reveals the resulting structured information from our IE system faithfully reflects the macroscopic features of Korean legal system.

Data-efficient end-to-end Information Extraction for Statistical Legal Analysis

Pre-training large transformer models with in-domain data improves domain adaptation and helps gain performance on the domain-specific downstream tasks. However, sharing models pre-trained on potentially sensitive data is prone to adversarial privacy attacks. In this paper, we asked to which extent we can guarantee privacy of pre-training data and, at the same time, achieve better downstream performance on legal tasks without the need of additional labeled data. We extensively experiment with scalable self-supervised learning of transformer models under the formal paradigm of differential privacy and show that under specific training configurations we can improve downstream performance without sacrifying privacy protection for the in-domain data. Our main contribution is utilizing differential privacy for large-scale pre-training of transformer language models in the legal NLP domain, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been addressed before.

Context-aware Information-theoretic Causal De-biasing for Interactive Sequence Labeling

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StuBot: Learning by Teaching a Conversational Agent Through Machine Reading Comprehension

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