@inproceedings{staliunaite-etal-2024-comparative,
title = "Comparative Study of Explainability Methods for Legal Outcome Prediction",
author = "Staliunaite, Ieva and
Valvoda, Josef and
Satoh, Ken",
editor = "Aletras, Nikolaos and
Chalkidis, Ilias and
Barrett, Leslie and
Goan{\textcommabelow{t}}{\u{a}}, C{\u{a}}t{\u{a}}lina and
Preo{\textcommabelow{t}}iuc-Pietro, Daniel and
Spanakis, Gerasimos",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, FL, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.20",
pages = "243--258",
abstract = "This paper investigates explainability in Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP). We study the task of legal outcome prediction of the European Court of Human Rights cases in a ternary classification setup, where a language model is fine-tuned to predict whether an article has been claimed and violated (positive outcome), claimed but not violated (negative outcome) or not claimed at all (null outcome). Specifically, we experiment with three popular NLP explainability methods. Correlating the attribution scores of input-level methods (Integrated Gradients and Contrastive Explanations) with rationales from court rulings, we show that the correlations are very weak, with absolute values of Spearman and Kendall correlation coefficients ranging between 0.003 and 0.094. Furthermore, we use a concept-level interpretability method (Concept Erasure) with human expert annotations of legal reasoning, to show that obscuring legal concepts from the model representation has an insignificant effect on model performance (at most a decline of 0.26 F1). Therefore, our results indicate that automated legal outcome prediction models are not reliably grounded in legal reasoning.",
}
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<abstract>This paper investigates explainability in Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP). We study the task of legal outcome prediction of the European Court of Human Rights cases in a ternary classification setup, where a language model is fine-tuned to predict whether an article has been claimed and violated (positive outcome), claimed but not violated (negative outcome) or not claimed at all (null outcome). Specifically, we experiment with three popular NLP explainability methods. Correlating the attribution scores of input-level methods (Integrated Gradients and Contrastive Explanations) with rationales from court rulings, we show that the correlations are very weak, with absolute values of Spearman and Kendall correlation coefficients ranging between 0.003 and 0.094. Furthermore, we use a concept-level interpretability method (Concept Erasure) with human expert annotations of legal reasoning, to show that obscuring legal concepts from the model representation has an insignificant effect on model performance (at most a decline of 0.26 F1). Therefore, our results indicate that automated legal outcome prediction models are not reliably grounded in legal reasoning.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Comparative Study of Explainability Methods for Legal Outcome Prediction
%A Staliunaite, Ieva
%A Valvoda, Josef
%A Satoh, Ken
%Y Aletras, Nikolaos
%Y Chalkidis, Ilias
%Y Barrett, Leslie
%Y Goan\textcommabelowtă, Cătălina
%Y Preo\textcommabelowtiuc-Pietro, Daniel
%Y Spanakis, Gerasimos
%S Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024
%D 2024
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Miami, FL, USA
%F staliunaite-etal-2024-comparative
%X This paper investigates explainability in Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP). We study the task of legal outcome prediction of the European Court of Human Rights cases in a ternary classification setup, where a language model is fine-tuned to predict whether an article has been claimed and violated (positive outcome), claimed but not violated (negative outcome) or not claimed at all (null outcome). Specifically, we experiment with three popular NLP explainability methods. Correlating the attribution scores of input-level methods (Integrated Gradients and Contrastive Explanations) with rationales from court rulings, we show that the correlations are very weak, with absolute values of Spearman and Kendall correlation coefficients ranging between 0.003 and 0.094. Furthermore, we use a concept-level interpretability method (Concept Erasure) with human expert annotations of legal reasoning, to show that obscuring legal concepts from the model representation has an insignificant effect on model performance (at most a decline of 0.26 F1). Therefore, our results indicate that automated legal outcome prediction models are not reliably grounded in legal reasoning.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.20
%P 243-258
Markdown (Informal)
[Comparative Study of Explainability Methods for Legal Outcome Prediction](https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.20) (Staliunaite et al., NLLP 2024)
ACL