Question Answering for Privacy Policies: Combining Computational and Legal Perspectives

Abhilasha Ravichander, Alan W Black, Shomir Wilson, Thomas Norton, Norman Sadeh

Abstract
Privacy policies are long and complex documents that are difficult for users to read and understand. Yet, they have legal effects on how user data can be collected, managed and used. Ideally, we would like to empower users to inform themselves about the issues that matter to them, and enable them to selectively explore these issues. We present PrivacyQA, a corpus consisting of 1750 questions about the privacy policies of mobile applications, and over 3500 expert annotations of relevant answers. We observe that a strong neural baseline underperforms human performance by almost 0.3 F1 on PrivacyQA, suggesting considerable room for improvement for future systems. Further, we use this dataset to categorically identify challenges to question answerability, with domain-general implications for any question answering system. The PrivacyQA corpus offers a challenging corpus for question answering, with genuine real world utility.
Anthology ID:
D19-1500
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4947–4958
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1500
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1500
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhilasha Ravichander, Alan W Black, Shomir Wilson, Thomas Norton, and Norman Sadeh. 2019. Question Answering for Privacy Policies: Combining Computational and Legal Perspectives. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 4947–4958, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Question Answering for Privacy Policies: Combining Computational and Legal Perspectives (Ravichander et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/D19-1500.pdf
Code
 AbhilashaRavichander/PrivacyQA_EMNLP
Data
SQuAD
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