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Enhancing Rhetorical Role Labeling in Legal Documents through Neighborhood-Aware Techniques


แนวคิดหลัก
Leveraging knowledge from semantically and contextually similar instances can enhance the performance of rhetorical role classifiers in legal documents, particularly in addressing challenges such as label imbalance and intricate role intertwining.
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The content discusses the task of Rhetorical Role Labeling (RRL) in legal documents, which involves assigning functional roles to sentences in a document, such as preamble, factual content, evidence, reasoning, etc. The task faces several challenges, including contextual dependencies, intertwined rhetorical roles, limited annotated data, and label imbalance.

The authors propose two approaches to leverage knowledge from semantically and contextually similar instances to enhance RRL performance:

  1. Inference-based Approach:

    • Interpolation with k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN): Interpolate the label distribution predicted by the baseline model with the distribution derived from the k-nearest training instances.
    • Interpolation with Single Prototype: Use a single prototype per label, representing the average of contextualized embeddings of sentences with the same label.
    • Interpolation with Multiple Prototypes: Use multiple prototypes per label to capture diverse variations within the same label.
  2. Training-based Approach:

    • Contrastive Learning: Bring instances with the same label closer in the embedding space and push away instances with different labels.
    • Discourse-aware Contrastive Learning: Incorporate relative position information to encourage instances with the same label and in close proximity within the document to be closer in the embedding space.
    • Single Prototypical Learning: Use a single prototype per label as a guiding point during training.
    • Multi-Prototypical Learning: Use multiple prototypes per label to capture diverse variations within the same label.

The authors evaluate their proposed methods on four datasets from the Indian legal domain and observe significant improvements, particularly in the challenging macro-F1 metric. They also assess the cross-domain generalizability of their methods, demonstrating their effectiveness in transferring knowledge across diverse legal domains.

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ข้อมูลเชิงลึกที่สำคัญจาก

by T.Y.S.S Sant... ที่ arxiv.org 04-03-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.01344.pdf
Mind Your Neighbours

สอบถามเพิ่มเติม

What are the potential implications of reformulating the RRL task as a multi-label classification problem, where each sentence can be associated with multiple rhetorical roles

Reformulating the RRL task as a multi-label classification problem, where each sentence can be associated with multiple rhetorical roles, can have significant implications. This approach would allow for a more nuanced representation of the complex nature of legal documents, where sentences often serve multiple purposes simultaneously. By enabling sentences to be tagged with multiple roles, the model can capture the intricate relationships and functions that sentences fulfill within the legal context. This can lead to a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of the document's structure and content, enhancing the overall performance of the RRL system. Additionally, it can provide richer insights for downstream tasks such as case summarization, semantic search, and argument mining by capturing the multifaceted nature of legal texts.

How can the proposed methods be extended to address the challenge of assigning rhetorical roles at a finer-grained level, such as at the phrase or sub-sentence level, while specifying the dependency relations between these segments

To address the challenge of assigning rhetorical roles at a finer-grained level, such as at the phrase or sub-sentence level, while specifying the dependency relations between these segments, the proposed methods can be extended in the following ways: Fine-grained Labeling: Develop models that can assign rhetorical roles not just at the sentence level but also at the phrase or sub-sentence level. This would involve segmenting sentences into smaller units and labeling each segment with the appropriate rhetorical role. Dependency Modeling: Incorporate dependency parsing techniques to capture the relationships between phrases or sub-sentences within a sentence. By analyzing the syntactic and semantic dependencies, the model can better understand how different segments contribute to the overall rhetorical structure of the document. Hierarchical Approaches: Implement hierarchical models that can hierarchically classify segments at different levels of granularity. This would involve first identifying phrases or sub-sentences and then assigning rhetorical roles to these segments based on their relationships and dependencies. Annotation Guidelines: Develop annotation guidelines that specify how to label phrases or sub-sentences with rhetorical roles and define the dependency relations between these segments. This would ensure consistency in labeling and facilitate the training of models to capture fine-grained rhetorical structures. By incorporating these extensions, the RRL system can achieve a more detailed and nuanced analysis of legal documents, capturing the subtle variations in rhetorical roles at a finer level of granularity.

Given the focus on datasets from the Indian legal domain, how can the robustness and generalizability of the proposed methods be further evaluated by expanding the assessment to encompass diverse legal contexts across different countries and regions

To evaluate the robustness and generalizability of the proposed methods beyond the Indian legal domain, it is essential to expand the assessment to encompass diverse legal contexts across different countries and regions. This can be achieved through the following strategies: Dataset Collection: Gather legal documents from various jurisdictions and languages to create a diverse and representative dataset for training and evaluation. Include documents from different legal systems, such as common law, civil law, and hybrid systems, to capture the variability in legal language and structures. Cross-Domain Evaluation: Train the RRL models on datasets from one legal context and test them on datasets from different contexts to assess their performance in cross-domain scenarios. Measure the model's ability to generalize across diverse legal domains and identify any domain-specific biases or challenges. Transfer Learning: Explore transfer learning techniques to adapt models trained on one legal domain to perform well on unseen domains. Fine-tune the models on target datasets to leverage the knowledge learned from the source domain while adapting to the specific characteristics of the new domain. Multilingual Analysis: Consider datasets in multiple languages to evaluate the models' performance in multilingual settings. Assess how well the models can handle language-specific nuances and variations in legal terminology across different linguistic backgrounds. By conducting thorough evaluations across diverse legal contexts, the proposed methods can be validated for their robustness and generalizability, paving the way for the development of more effective and versatile RRL systems in the legal domain.
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