PyEuroVoc: A Tool for Multilingual Legal Document Classification with EuroVoc Descriptors

Andrei-Marius Avram, Vasile Pais, Dan Ioan Tufis


Abstract
EuroVoc is a multilingual thesaurus that was built for organizing the legislative documentary of the European Union institutions. It contains thousands of categories at different levels of specificity and its descriptors are targeted by legal texts in almost thirty languages. In this work we propose a unified framework for EuroVoc classification on 22 languages by fine-tuning modern Transformer-based pretrained language models. We study extensively the performance of our trained models and show that they significantly improve the results obtained by a similar tool - JEX - on the same dataset. The code and the fine-tuned models were open sourced, together with a programmatic interface that eases the process of loading the weights of a trained model and of classifying a new document.
Anthology ID:
2021.ranlp-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)
Month:
September
Year:
2021
Address:
Held Online
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd.
Note:
Pages:
92–101
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ranlp-1.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrei-Marius Avram, Vasile Pais, and Dan Ioan Tufis. 2021. PyEuroVoc: A Tool for Multilingual Legal Document Classification with EuroVoc Descriptors. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021), pages 92–101, Held Online. INCOMA Ltd..
Cite (Informal):
PyEuroVoc: A Tool for Multilingual Legal Document Classification with EuroVoc Descriptors (Avram et al., RANLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2021.ranlp-1.12.pdf
Code
 racai-ai/pyeurovoc +  additional community code