Comparative Study of Explainability Methods for Legal Outcome Prediction

Ieva Staliunaite, Josef Valvoda, Ken Satoh


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.
Anthology ID:
2024.nllp-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, FL, USA
Editors:
Nikolaos Aletras, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Cătălina Goanță, Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro, Gerasimos Spanakis
Venue:
NLLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
243–258
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.20
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ieva Staliunaite, Josef Valvoda, and Ken Satoh. 2024. Comparative Study of Explainability Methods for Legal Outcome Prediction. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024, pages 243–258, Miami, FL, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Comparative Study of Explainability Methods for Legal Outcome Prediction (Staliunaite et al., NLLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.20.pdf