This paper summarizes the participation of our team (Flawless Lawgic) in the legal named entity recognition (L-NER) task at LegalLens 2024: Detecting Legal Violations. Given possible unstructured texts (e.g., online media texts), we aim to identify legal violations by extracting legal entities such as “violation”, “violation by”, “violation on”, and “law”. This system-description paper discusses our approaches to address the task, empirically highlighting the performances of fine-tuning models from the Transformers family (e.g., RoBERTa and DeBERTa) against open-sourced LLMs (e.g., Llama, Mistral) with different tuning settings (e.g., LoRA, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and prompting strategies). Our best results, with a weighted F1 of 0.705 on the test set, show a 30 percentage points increase in F1 compared to the baseline and rank 2 on the leaderboard, leaving a marginal gap of only 0.4 percentage points lower than the top solution. Our solutions are available at github.com/honghanhh/lner.

In this paper, we detail the methodology of team whatdoyoumeme for the SemEval 2024 Task on Multilingual Persuasion Detection in Memes. We integrate hierarchical label information to refine detection capabilities, and employ a cross-lingual approach, utilizing translation to adapt the model to Macedonian, Arabic, and Bulgarian. Our methodology encompasses both the analysis of meme content and extending labels to include hierarchical structure. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through improved model performance in multilingual contexts, highlighting the utility of translation-based methods and hierarchy-aware learning, over traditional baselines.