Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system

Marius Büttner, Ivan Habernal


Abstract
What is preventing us from building a NLP system that could help real people in real situations, for instance when they need legal advice but don’t understand law? This question is trickier than one might think, because legal systems vary from country to country, so do the law books, availability of data, and incomprehensibility of legalese. In this paper we focus Germany (which employs the civil-law system where, roughly speaking, interpretation of law codes dominates over precedence) and lay a foundational work to address the laymen’s legal question answering empirically. We create GerLayQA, a new dataset comprising of 21k laymen’s legal questions paired with answers from lawyers and grounded to concrete law book paragraphs. We experiment with a variety of retrieval and answer generation models and provide an in-depth analysis of limitations, which helps us to provide first empirical answers to the question above.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.122
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2015–2027
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.122
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marius Büttner and Ivan Habernal. 2024. Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2015–2027, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system (Büttner & Habernal, EACL 2024)
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