This work presents a manually annotated dataset for Information Extraction (IE) from legal wills, and relevant in-context learning experiments on the dataset. The dataset consists of entities, binary relations between the entities (e.g., relations between testator and beneficiary), and n-ary events (e.g., bequest) extracted from 45 legal wills from two US states. This dataset can serve as a foundation for downstream tasks in the legal domain. Another use case of this dataset is evaluating the performance of large language models (LLMs) on this IE task. We evaluated GPT-4 with our dataset to investigate its ability to extract information from legal wills. Our evaluation result demonstrates that the model is capable of handling the task reasonably well. When given instructions and examples as a prompt, GPT-4 shows decent performance for both entity extraction and relation extraction tasks. Nevertheless, the evaluation result also reveals that the model is not perfect. We observed inconsistent outputs (given a prompt) as well as prompt over-generalization.

This study investigates whether a legal natural language inference (NLI) model trained on the data from one US state can be transferred to another state. We fine-tuned a pre-trained model on the task of evaluating the validity of legal will statements, once with the dataset containing the Tennessee wills and once with the dataset containing the Idaho wills. Each model’s performance on the in-domain setting and the out-of-domain setting are compared to see if the models can across the states. We found that the model trained on one US state can be mostly transferred to another state. However, it is clear that the model’s performance drops in the out-of-domain setting. The F1 scores of the Tennessee model and the Idaho model are 96.41 and 92.03 when predicting the data from the same state, but they drop to 66.32 and 81.60 when predicting the data from another state. Subsequent error analysis revealed that there are two major sources of errors. First, the model fails to recognize equivalent laws across states when there are stylistic differences between laws. Second, difference in statutory section numbering system between the states makes it difficult for the model to locate laws relevant to the cases being predicted on. This analysis provides insights on how the future NLI system can be improved. Also, our findings offer empirical support to legal experts advocating the standardization of legal documents.

This paper describes the submission by the University of Arizona to the SIGMORPHON 2023 Shared Task on typologically diverse morphological (re-)infection. In our submission, we investigate the role of frequency, length, and weighted transducers in addressing the challenge of morphological reinflection. We start with the non-neural baseline provided for the task and show how some improvement can be gained by integrating length and frequency in prefix selection. We also investigate using weighted finite-state transducers, jump-started from edit distance and directly augmented with frequency. Our specific technique is promising and quite simple, but we see only modest improvements for some languages here.

This work introduces a natural language inference (NLI) dataset that focuses on the validity of statements in legal wills. This dataset is unique because: (a) each entailment decision requires three inputs: the statement from the will, the law, and the conditions that hold at the time of the testator’s death; and (b) the included texts are longer than the ones in current NLI datasets. We trained eight neural NLI models in this dataset. All the models achieve more than 80% macro F1 and accuracy, which indicates that neural approaches can handle this task reasonably well. However, group accuracy, a stricter evaluation measure that is calculated with a group of positive and negative examples generated from the same statement as a unit, is in mid 80s at best, which suggests that the models’ understanding of the task remains superficial. Further ablative analyses and explanation experiments indicate that all three text segments are used for prediction, but some decisions rely on semantically irrelevant tokens. This indicates that overfitting on these longer texts likely happens, and that additional research is required for this task to be solved.