Structured Persuasive Writing Support in Legal Education: A Model and Tool for German Legal Case Solutions

Florian Weber, Thiemo Wambsganss, Seyed Parsa Neshaei, Matthias Soellner


Abstract
We present an annotation approach for capturing structured components and arguments inlegal case solutions of German students. Based on the appraisal style, which dictates the structured way of persuasive writing in German law, we propose an annotation scheme with annotation guidelines that identify structured writing in legal case solutions. We conducted an annotation study with two annotators and annotated legal case solutions to capture the structures of a persuasive legal text. Based on our dataset, we trained three transformer-based models to show that the annotated components can be successfully predicted, e.g. to provide users with writing assistance for legal texts. We evaluated a writing support system in which our models were integrated in an online experiment with law students and found positive learning success and users’ perceptions. Finally, we present our freely available corpus of 413 law student case studies to support the development of intelligent writing support systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.145
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2296–2313
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.145
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.145
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Florian Weber, Thiemo Wambsganss, Seyed Parsa Neshaei, and Matthias Soellner. 2023. Structured Persuasive Writing Support in Legal Education: A Model and Tool for German Legal Case Solutions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 2296–2313, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Structured Persuasive Writing Support in Legal Education: A Model and Tool for German Legal Case Solutions (Weber et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.145.pdf