In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end pipeline for retrieving, processing, and extracting targeted information from legal cases. We investigate an under-studied legal domain with a case study on refugee law Canada. Searching case law for past similar cases is a key part of legal work for both lawyers and judges, the potential end-users of our prototype. While traditional named-entity recognition labels such as dates are meaningful information in law, we propose to extend existing models and retrieve a total of 19 categories of items from refugee cases. After creating a novel data set of cases, we perform information extraction based on state-of-the-art neural named-entity recognition (NER). We test different architectures including two transformer models, using contextual and non-contextual embeddings, and compare general purpose versus domain-specific pre-training. The results demonstrate that models pre-trained on legal data perform best despite their smaller size, suggesting that domain-matching had a larger effect than network architecture. We achieve a F1- score superior to 90% on five of the targeted categories and superior to 80% on an additional 4 categories.

Language Models (LMs) have proven their ability to acquire diverse linguistic knowledge during the pretraining phase, potentially serving as a valuable source of incidental supervision for downstream tasks. However, there has been limited research conducted on the retrieval of domain-specific knowledge, and specifically legal knowledge. We propose to explore the task of Entity Typing, serving as a proxy for evaluating legal knowledge as an essential aspect of text comprehension, and a foundational task to numerous downstream legal NLP applications. Through systematic evaluation and analysis and two types of prompting (cloze sentences and QA-based templates) and to clarify the nature of these acquired cues, we compare diverse types and lengths of entities both general and domain-specific entities, semantics or syntax signals, and different LM pretraining corpus (generic and legal-oriented) and architectures (encoder BERT-based and decoder-only with Llama2). We show that (1) Llama2 performs well on certain entities and exhibits potential for substantial improvement with optimized prompt templates, (2) law-oriented LMs show inconsistent performance, possibly due to variations in their training corpus, (3) LMs demonstrate the ability to type entities even in the case of multi-token entities, (4) all models struggle with entities belonging to sub-domains of the law (5) Llama2 appears to frequently overlook syntactic cues, a shortcoming less present in BERT-based architectures.

Advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and language models have demonstrated immense potential in the legal domain, enabling automated analysis and comprehension of legal texts. However, developing robust models in Legal NLP is significantly challenged by the scarcity of resources. This paper presents AsyLex, the first dataset specifically designed for Refugee Law applications to address this gap. The dataset introduces 59,112 documents on refugee status determination in Canada from 1996 to 2022, providing researchers and practitioners with essential material for training and evaluating NLP models for legal research and case review. Case review is defined as entity extraction and outcome prediction tasks. The dataset includes 19,115 gold-standard human-labeled annotations for 20 legally relevant entity types curated with the help of legal experts and 1,682 gold-standard labeled documents for the case outcome. Furthermore, we supply the corresponding trained entity extraction models and the resulting labeled entities generated through the inference process on AsyLex. Four supplementary features are obtained through rule-based extraction. We demonstrate the usefulness of our dataset on the legal judgment prediction task to predict the binary outcome and test a set of baselines using the text of the documents and our annotations. We observe that models pretrained on similar legal documents reach better scores, suggesting that acquiring more datasets for specialized domains such as law is crucial.

This paper proposes an approach to the design of an ethical human-AI reasoning support system for decision makers in refugee law. In the context of refugee status determination, practitioners mostly rely on text data. We therefore investigate human-AI cooperation in legal natural language processing. Specifically, we want to determine which design methods can be transposed to legal text analytics. Although little work has been done so far on human-centered design methods applicable to the legal domain, we assume that introducing iterative cooperation and user engagement in the design process is (1) a method to reduce technical limitations of an NLP system and (2) that it will help design more ethical and effective applications by taking users’ preferences and feedback into account. The proposed methodology is based on three main design steps: cognitive process formalization in models understandable by both humans and computers, speculative design of prototypes, and semi-directed interviews with a sample of potential users.