Balaji Srinivasan


2024

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Post-Hoc Answer Attribution for Grounded and Trustworthy Long Document Comprehension: Task, Insights, and Challenges
Abhilasha Sancheti | Koustava Goswami | Balaji Srinivasan
Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2024)

Attributing answer text to its source document for information-seeking questions is crucial for building trustworthy, reliable, and accountable systems. We formulate a new task of post-hoc answer attribution for long document comprehension (LDC). Owing to the lack of long-form abstractive and information-seeking LDC datasets, we refactor existing datasets to assess the strengths and weaknesses of existing retrieval-based and proposed answer decomposition and textual entailment-based optimal selection attribution systems for this task. We throw light on the limitations of existing datasets and the need for datasets to assess the actual performance of systems on this task.

2023

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What to Read in a Contract? Party-Specific Summarization of Legal Obligations, Entitlements, and Prohibitions
Abhilasha Sancheti | Aparna Garimella | Balaji Srinivasan | Rachel Rudinger
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Reviewing and comprehending key obligations, entitlements, and prohibitions in legal contracts can be a tedious task due to their length and domain-specificity. Furthermore, the key rights and duties requiring review vary for each contracting party. In this work, we propose a new task of party-specific extractive summarization for legal contracts to facilitate faster reviewing and improved comprehension of rights and duties. To facilitate this, we curate a dataset comprising of party-specific pairwise importance comparisons annotated by legal experts, covering ~293K sentence pairs that include obligations, entitlements, and prohibitions extracted from lease agreements. Using this dataset, we train a pairwise importance ranker and propose a pipeline-based extractive summarization system that generates a party-specific contract summary. We establish the need for incorporating domain-specific notions of importance during summarization by comparing our system against various baselines using both automatic and human evaluation methods.