Detecting Relevant Differences Between Similar Legal Texts

Xiang Li, Jiaxun Gao, Diana Inkpen, Wolfgang Alschner


Abstract
Given two similar legal texts, is it useful to be able to focus only on the parts that contain relevant differences. However, because of variation in linguistic structure and terminology, it is not easy to identify true semantic differences. An accurate difference detection model between similar legal texts is therefore in demand, in order to increase the efficiency of legal research and document analysis. In this paper, we automatically label a training dataset of sentence pairs using an existing legal resource of international investment treaties that were already manually annotated with metadata. Then we propose models based on state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for the novel task of detecting relevant differences. In addition to providing solutions for this task, we include models for automatically producing metadata for the treaties that do not have it.
Anthology ID:
2022.nllp-1.24
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:
256–264
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.24
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.nllp-1.24
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiang Li, Jiaxun Gao, Diana Inkpen, and Wolfgang Alschner. 2022. Detecting Relevant Differences Between Similar Legal Texts. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022, pages 256–264, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Relevant Differences Between Similar Legal Texts (Li et al., NLLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.24.pdf