Resolving Legalese: A Multilingual Exploration of Negation Scope Resolution in Legal Documents

Ramona Christen, Anastassia Shaitarova, Matthias Stürmer, Joel Niklaus

Abstract
Resolving the scope of a negation within a sentence is a challenging NLP task. The complexity of legal texts and the lack of annotated in-domain negation corpora pose challenges for state-of-the-art (SotA) models when performing negation scope resolution on multilingual legal data. Our experiments demonstrate that models pre-trained without legal data underperform in the task of negation scope resolution. We release a new set of annotated court decisions in German, French, and Italian and use it to improve negation scope resolution in both zero-shot and multilingual settings. We achieve token-level F1-scores of up to 86.7% in our zero-shot cross-lingual experiments, where the models are trained on two languages of our legal datasets and evaluated on the third. Our multilingual experiments, where the models were trained on all available negation data and evaluated on our legal datasets, resulted in F1-scores of up to 91.1%.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1220
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
13992–14004
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1220
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ramona Christen, Anastassia Shaitarova, Matthias Stürmer, and Joel Niklaus. 2024. Resolving Legalese: A Multilingual Exploration of Negation Scope Resolution in Legal Documents. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 13992–14004, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Resolving Legalese: A Multilingual Exploration of Negation Scope Resolution in Legal Documents (Christen et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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