Simplifying text while preserving its meaning is a complex yet essential task, especially in sensitive domain applications like legal texts. When applied to a specialized field, like the legal domain, preservation differs significantly from its role in regular texts. This paper introduces FrJUDGE, a new dataset to assess legal meaning preservation between two legal texts. It also introduces JUDGEBERT, a novel evaluation metric designed to assess legal meaning preservation in French legal text simplification. JUDGEBERT demonstrates a superior correlation with human judgment compared to existing metrics. It also passes two crucial sanity checks, while other metrics did not: For two identical sentences, it always returns a score of 100%; on the other hand, it returns 0% for two unrelated sentences. Our findings highlight its potential to transform legal NLP applications, ensuring accuracy and accessibility for text simplification for legal practitioners and lay users.

Large and Transformer-based language models perform outstandingly in various downstream tasks. However, there is limited understanding regarding how these models internalize linguistic knowledge, so various linguistic benchmarks have recently been proposed to facilitate syntactic evaluation of language models across languages. This paper introduces QFrCoLA (Quebec-French Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability Judgments), a normative binary acceptability judgments dataset comprising 25,153 in-domain and 2,675 out-of-domain sentences. Our study leverages the QFrCoLA dataset and seven other linguistic binary acceptability judgment corpora to benchmark seven language models. The results demonstrate that, on average, fine-tuned Transformer-based LM are strong baselines for most languages and that zero-shot binary classification large language models perform poorly on the task. However, for the QFrCoLA benchmark, on average, a fine-tuned Transformer-based LM outperformed other methods tested. It also shows that pre-trained cross-lingual LLMs selected for our experimentation do not seem to have acquired linguistic judgment capabilities during their pre-training for Quebec French. Finally, our experiment results on QFrCoLA show that our dataset, built from examples that illustrate linguistic norms rather than speakers’ feelings, is similar to linguistic acceptability judgment; it is a challenging dataset that can benchmark LM on their linguistic judgment capabilities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform outstandingly in various downstream tasks, and the use of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture has been shown to improve performance for legal question answering (Nuruzzaman and Hussain, 2020; Louis et al., 2024). However, there are limited applications in insurance questions-answering, a specific type of legal document. This paper introduces two corpora: the Quebec Automobile Insurance Expertise Reference Corpus and a set of 82 Expert Answers to Layperson Automobile Insurance Questions. Our study leverages both corpora to automatically and manually assess a GPT4-o, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM, to answer Quebec automobile insurance questions. Our results demonstrate that, on average, using our expertise reference corpus generates better responses on both automatic and manual evaluation metrics. However, they also highlight that LLM QA is unreliable enough for mass utilization in critical areas. Indeed, our results show that between 5% to 13% of answered questions include a false statement that could lead to customer misunderstanding.

Plumitifs (dockets) were initially a tool for law clerks. Nowadays, they are used as summaries presenting all the steps of a judicial case. Information concerning parties’ identity, jurisdiction in charge of administering the case, and some information relating to the nature and the course of the preceding are available through plumitifs. They are publicly accessible but barely understandable; they are written using abbreviations and referring to provisions from the Criminal Code of Canada, which makes them hard to reason about. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient multi-source language generation architecture that leverages both the plumitif and the Criminal Code’s content to generate intelligible plumitifs descriptions. It goes without saying that ethical considerations rise with these sensitive documents made readable and available at scale, legitimate concerns that we address in this paper. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first application of plumitifs descriptions generation made available for French speakers along with an ethical discussion about the topic.

The presence of toxic content has become a major problem for many online communities. Moderators try to limit this problem by implementing more and more refined comment filters, but toxic users are constantly finding new ways to circumvent them. Our hypothesis is that while modifying toxic content and keywords to fool filters can be easy, hiding sentiment is harder. In this paper, we explore various aspects of sentiment detection and their correlation to toxicity, and use our results to implement a toxicity detection tool. We then test how adding the sentiment information helps detect toxicity in three different real-world datasets, and incorporate subversion to these datasets to simulate a user trying to circumvent the system. Our results show sentiment information has a positive impact on toxicity detection.