Towards Supporting Legal Argumentation with NLP: Is More Data Really All You Need?

Santosh T.y.s.s, Kevin Ashley, Katie Atkinson, Matthias Grabmair


Abstract
Modeling legal reasoning and argumentation justifying decisions in cases has always been central to AI & Law, yet contemporary developments in legal NLP have increasingly focused on statistically classifying legal conclusions from text. While conceptually “simpler’, these approaches often fall short in providing usable justifications connecting to appropriate legal concepts. This paper reviews both traditional symbolic works in AI & Law and recent advances in legal NLP, and distills possibilities of integrating expert-informed knowledge to strike a balance between scalability and explanation in symbolic vs. data-driven approaches. We identify open challenges and discuss the potential of modern NLP models and methods that integrate conceptual legal knowledge.
Anthology ID:
2024.nllp-1.36
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:
404–421
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.36
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Santosh T.y.s.s, Kevin Ashley, Katie Atkinson, and Matthias Grabmair. 2024. Towards Supporting Legal Argumentation with NLP: Is More Data Really All You Need?. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024, pages 404–421, Miami, FL, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Supporting Legal Argumentation with NLP: Is More Data Really All You Need? (T.y.s.s et al., NLLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nllp-1.36.pdf