Parameter-Efficient Legal Domain Adaptation

Jonathan Li, Rohan Bhambhoria, Xiaodan Zhu


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2022.nllp-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Nikolaos Aletras, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Cătălina Goanță, Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro
Venue:
NLLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
119–129
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.10
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.nllp-1.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan Li, Rohan Bhambhoria, and Xiaodan Zhu. 2022. Parameter-Efficient Legal Domain Adaptation. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022, pages 119–129, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Parameter-Efficient Legal Domain Adaptation (Li et al., NLLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.10.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.10.mp4