DeBERTa Beats Behemoths: A Comparative Analysis of Fine-Tuning, Prompting, and PEFT Approaches on LegalLensNER

Hanh Thi Hong Tran, Nishan Chatterjee, Senja Pollak, Antoine Doucet


Abstract
This paper summarizes the participation of our team (Flawless Lawgic) in the legal named entity recognition (L-NER) task at LegalLens 2024: Detecting Legal Violations. Given possible unstructured texts (e.g., online media texts), we aim to identify legal violations by extracting legal entities such as “violation”, “violation by”, “violation on”, and “law”. This system-description paper discusses our approaches to address the task, empirically highlighting the performances of fine-tuning models from the Transformers family (e.g., RoBERTa and DeBERTa) against open-sourced LLMs (e.g., Llama, Mistral) with different tuning settings (e.g., LoRA, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and prompting strategies). Our best results, with a weighted F1 of 0.705 on the test set, show a 30 percentage points increase in F1 compared to the baseline and rank 2 on the leaderboard, leaving a marginal gap of only 0.4 percentage points lower than the top solution. Our solutions are available at github.com/honghanhh/lner.
Anthology ID:
2024.nllp-1.34
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:
371–380
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.34
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hanh Thi Hong Tran, Nishan Chatterjee, Senja Pollak, and Antoine Doucet. 2024. DeBERTa Beats Behemoths: A Comparative Analysis of Fine-Tuning, Prompting, and PEFT Approaches on LegalLensNER. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024, pages 371–380, Miami, FL, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DeBERTa Beats Behemoths: A Comparative Analysis of Fine-Tuning, Prompting, and PEFT Approaches on LegalLensNER (Tran et al., NLLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.34.pdf