The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects

Robert Mahari, Dominik Stammbach, Elliott Ash, Alex Pentland


Abstract
Legal practice is intrinsically rooted in the fabric of language, yet legal practitioners and scholars have been slow to adopt tools from natural language processing (NLP). At the same time, the legal system is experiencing an access to justice crisis, which could be partially alleviated with NLP. In this position paper, we argue that the slow uptake of NLP in legal practice is exacerbated by a disconnect between the needs of the legal community and the focus of NLP researchers. In a review of recent trends in the legal NLP literature, we find limited overlap between the legal NLP community and legal academia. Our interpretation is that some of the most popular legal NLP tasks fail to address the needs of legal practitioners. We discuss examples of legal NLP tasks that promise to bridge disciplinary disconnects and highlight interesting areas for legal NLP research that remain underexplored.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.224
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3445–3454
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.224
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.224
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Robert Mahari, Dominik Stammbach, Elliott Ash, and Alex Pentland. 2023. The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 3445–3454, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects (Mahari et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.224.pdf