Human-centered computing in legal NLP - An application to refugee status determination

Claire Barale


Abstract
This paper proposes an approach to the design of an ethical human-AI reasoning support system for decision makers in refugee law. In the context of refugee status determination, practitioners mostly rely on text data. We therefore investigate human-AI cooperation in legal natural language processing. Specifically, we want to determine which design methods can be transposed to legal text analytics. Although little work has been done so far on human-centered design methods applicable to the legal domain, we assume that introducing iterative cooperation and user engagement in the design process is (1) a method to reduce technical limitations of an NLP system and (2) that it will help design more ethical and effective applications by taking users’ preferences and feedback into account. The proposed methodology is based on three main design steps: cognitive process formalization in models understandable by both humans and computers, speculative design of prototypes, and semi-directed interviews with a sample of potential users.
Anthology ID:
2022.hcinlp-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bridging Human--Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, Washington
Editors:
Su Lin Blodgett, Hal Daumé III, Michael Madaio, Ani Nenkova, Brendan O'Connor, Hanna Wallach, Qian Yang
Venue:
HCINLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
28–33
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.hcinlp-1.4
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.hcinlp-1.4
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Claire Barale. 2022. Human-centered computing in legal NLP - An application to refugee status determination. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bridging Human--Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing, pages 28–33, Seattle, Washington. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Human-centered computing in legal NLP - An application to refugee status determination (Barale, HCINLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.hcinlp-1.4.pdf