A Comparative Study of Prompting Strategies for Legal Text Classification

Ali Hakimi Parizi, Yuyang Liu, Prudhvi Nokku, Sina Gholamian, David Emerson


Abstract
In this study, we explore the performance oflarge language models (LLMs) using differ-ent prompt engineering approaches in the con-text of legal text classification. Prior researchhas demonstrated that various prompting tech-niques can improve the performance of a di-verse array of tasks done by LLMs. However,in this research, we observe that professionaldocuments, and in particular legal documents,pose unique challenges for LLMs. We experi-ment with several LLMs and various promptingtechniques, including zero/few-shot prompting,prompt ensembling, chain-of-thought, and ac-tivation fine-tuning and compare the perfor-mance on legal datasets. Although the newgeneration of LLMs and prompt optimizationtechniques have been shown to improve gener-ation and understanding of generic tasks, ourfindings suggest that such improvements maynot readily transfer to other domains. Specifi-cally, experiments indicate that not all prompt-ing approaches and models are well-suited forthe legal domain which involves complexitiessuch as long documents and domain-specificlanguage.
Anthology ID:
2023.nllp-1.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro, Catalina Goanta, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Gerasimos (Jerry) Spanakis, Nikolaos Aletras
Venues:
NLLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
258–265
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nllp-1.25
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.nllp-1.25
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ali Hakimi Parizi, Yuyang Liu, Prudhvi Nokku, Sina Gholamian, and David Emerson. 2023. A Comparative Study of Prompting Strategies for Legal Text Classification. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2023, pages 258–265, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Comparative Study of Prompting Strategies for Legal Text Classification (Hakimi Parizi et al., NLLP-WS 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.nllp-1.25.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.nllp-1.25.mp4