核心概念
Automating the process of identifying paragraphs relevant to a query can streamline legal research, allowing practitioners to access crucial information efficiently.
要約
The paper focuses on the task of extracting relevant paragraphs from legal judgments based on a given query. The authors construct a specialized dataset for this task from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) using case law guides. They assess the performance of current retrieval models in a zero-shot way and establish fine-tuning benchmarks using various models. The results highlight the significant gap between fine-tuned and zero-shot performance, emphasizing the challenge of handling distribution shift in the legal domain. The authors notice that legal pre-training handles distribution shift on the corpus side but still struggles on query-side distribution shift, with unseen legal queries. They also explore various Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods to evaluate their practicality within the context of information retrieval, shedding light on the effectiveness of different PEFT methods across diverse configurations with pre-training and model architectures influencing the choice of PEFT method.
統計
Legal professionals often need to sift through voluminous legal judgments that encompass crucial insights for case law interpretations and judicial reasoning.
Finding relevant case law accounts for roughly 15 hours per week for a lawyer or nearly 30% of their annual working hours.
The number of paragraphs in judgments range from 21 to 942 with a mean of 102.78.
The percentage of relevant paragraphs in each query-judgement pair range from 0.10% to 15% to the total number of paragraphs in that judgement with a mean around 1.95%.
The queries and paragraphs have a mean length of 36 and 135 tokens respectively.
引用
"Legal professionals including lawyers, judges and paralegals, often need to sift through voluminous legal judgments that encompass crucial insights for case law interpretations and judicial reasoning."
"Finding relevant case law accounts for roughly 15 hours per week for a lawyer (Lastres, 2015) or nearly 30% of their annual working hours (Poje, 2014)."