ARGUS: Role-Aware Event Knowledge Graphs for U.S. Employment-Discrimination Complaints

Sriram Kannan, Swetha Saseendran, Vishnu Vardhan Reddy Kandi, Leslie Barrett, Madhavan Seshadri, Enrico Santus


Abstract
U.S. employment-discrimination complaints describe complex event sequences that are not explicitly captured by lexical or embedding-based representations alone. We present ARGUS, a source-grounded pipeline that combines a 5W1H-inspired schema, legal-domain models, and LLM-based structured generation to construct document-level Event Knowledge Graphs (EKGs) from CourtListener complaints. ARGUS extracts fact-bearing statements, builds chunk-level event graphs with participant, temporal, and causal structure, and merges them into document-level representations. We evaluate graph quality through human and multi-model assessment and test downstream utility on claim classification and legal QA. The graph-structured classifier outperforms raw and linearized baselines on the held-out set, and EKG-only retrieval improves document-scoped QA, while open-retrieval gains remain limited by low first-stage candidate recall. These results suggest that EKGs are most useful for organizing and reasoning over evidence once relevant material has been retrieved.
Anthology ID:
2026.nllp-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Nikolaos Aletras, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Cătălina Goanță, Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro, Gerasimos Spanakis, Shanshan Xu
Venues:
NLLP | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
142–155
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nllp-1.14/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sriram Kannan, Swetha Saseendran, Vishnu Vardhan Reddy Kandi, Leslie Barrett, Madhavan Seshadri, and Enrico Santus. 2026. ARGUS: Role-Aware Event Knowledge Graphs for U.S. Employment-Discrimination Complaints. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2026, pages 142–155, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ARGUS: Role-Aware Event Knowledge Graphs for U.S. Employment-Discrimination Complaints (Kannan et al., NLLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.nllp-1.14.pdf