PoliToHFI at SemEval-2023 Task 6: Leveraging Entity-Aware and Hierarchical Transformers For Legal Entity Recognition and Court Judgment Prediction

Irene Benedetto, Alkis Koudounas, Lorenzo Vaiani, Eliana Pastor, Elena Baralis, Luca Cagliero, Francesco Tarasconi


Abstract
The use of Natural Language Processing techniques in the legal domain has become established for supporting attorneys and domain experts in content retrieval and decision-making. However, understanding the legal text poses relevant challenges in the recognition of domain-specific entities and the adaptation and explanation of predictive models. This paper addresses the Legal Entity Name Recognition (L-NER) and Court judgment Prediction (CPJ) and Explanation (CJPE) tasks. The L-NER solution explores the use of various transformer-based models, including an entity-aware method attending domain-specific entities. The CJPE proposed method relies on hierarchical BERT-based classifiers combined with local input attribution explainers. We propose a broad comparison of eXplainable AI methodologies along with a novel approach based on NER. For the L-NER task, the experimental results remark on the importance of domain-specific pre-training. For CJP our lightweight solution shows performance in line with existing approaches, and our NER-boosted explanations show promising CJPE results in terms of the conciseness of the prediction explanations.
Anthology ID:
2023.semeval-1.194
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, A. Seza Doğruöz, Giovanni Da San Martino, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Ritesh Kumar, Elisa Sartori
Venue:
SemEval
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1401–1411
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.194
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.semeval-1.194
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Irene Benedetto, Alkis Koudounas, Lorenzo Vaiani, Eliana Pastor, Elena Baralis, Luca Cagliero, and Francesco Tarasconi. 2023. PoliToHFI at SemEval-2023 Task 6: Leveraging Entity-Aware and Hierarchical Transformers For Legal Entity Recognition and Court Judgment Prediction. In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023), pages 1401–1411, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PoliToHFI at SemEval-2023 Task 6: Leveraging Entity-Aware and Hierarchical Transformers For Legal Entity Recognition and Court Judgment Prediction (Benedetto et al., SemEval 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.194.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.194.mp4