@inproceedings{chalkidis-etal-2020-legal,
    title = "{LEGAL}-{BERT}: The Muppets straight out of Law School",
    author = "Chalkidis, Ilias  and
      Fergadiotis, Manos  and
      Malakasiotis, Prodromos  and
      Aletras, Nikolaos  and
      Androutsopoulos, Ion",
    editor = "Cohn, Trevor  and
      He, Yulan  and
      Liu, Yang",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020",
    month = nov,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.261",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.261",
    pages = "2898--2904",
    abstract = "BERT has achieved impressive performance in several NLP tasks. However, there has been limited investigation on its adaptation guidelines in specialised domains. Here we focus on the legal domain, where we explore several approaches for applying BERT models to downstream legal tasks, evaluating on multiple datasets. Our findings indicate that the previous guidelines for pre-training and fine-tuning, often blindly followed, do not always generalize well in the legal domain. Thus we propose a systematic investigation of the available strategies when applying BERT in specialised domains. These are: (a) use the original BERT out of the box, (b) adapt BERT by additional pre-training on domain-specific corpora, and (c) pre-train BERT from scratch on domain-specific corpora. We also propose a broader hyper-parameter search space when fine-tuning for downstream tasks and we release LEGAL-BERT, a family of BERT models intended to assist legal NLP research, computational law, and legal technology applications.",
}
@inproceedings{chalkidis-etal-2022-lexglue,
    title = "{L}ex{GLUE}: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in {E}nglish",
    author = "Chalkidis, Ilias  and
      Jana, Abhik  and
      Hartung, Dirk  and
      Bommarito, Michael  and
      Androutsopoulos, Ion  and
      Katz, Daniel  and
      Aletras, Nikolaos",
    editor = "Muresan, Smaranda  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Villavicencio, Aline",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.297",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.297",
    pages = "4310--4330",
    abstract = "Laws and their interpretations, legal arguments and agreements are typically expressed in writing, leading to the production of vast corpora of legal text. Their analysis, which is at the center of legal practice, becomes increasingly elaborate as these collections grow in size. Natural language understanding (NLU) technologies can be a valuable tool to support legal practitioners in these endeavors. Their usefulness, however, largely depends on whether current state-of-the-art models can generalize across various tasks in the legal domain. To answer this currently open question, we introduce the Legal General Language Understanding Evaluation (LexGLUE) benchmark, a collection of datasets for evaluating model performance across a diverse set of legal NLU tasks in a standardized way. We also provide an evaluation and analysis of several generic and legal-oriented models demonstrating that the latter consistently offer performance improvements across multiple tasks.",
}
@inproceedings{bongard-etal-2022-legal,
    title = "The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure",
    author = "Bongard, Leonard  and
      Held, Lena  and
      Habernal, Ivan",
    editor = "Aletras, Nikolaos  and
      Chalkidis, Ilias  and
      Barrett, Leslie  and
      Goan{\textcommabelow{t}}{\u{a}}, C{\u{a}}t{\u{a}}lina  and
      Preo{\textcommabelow{t}}iuc-Pietro, Daniel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022",
    month = dec,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.17",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.nllp-1.17",
    pages = "194--207",
    abstract = "We present a new NLP task and dataset from the domain of the U.S. civil procedure. Each instance of the dataset consists of a general introduction to the case, a particular question, and a possible solution argument, accompanied by a detailed analysis of why the argument applies in that case. Since the dataset is based on a book aimed at law students, we believe that it represents a truly complex task for benchmarking modern legal language models. Our baseline evaluation shows that fine-tuning a legal transformer provides some advantage over random baseline models, but our analysis reveals that the actual ability to infer legal arguments remains a challenging open research question.",
}
@inproceedings{NEURIPS2020_d89a66c7,
 author = {Khosla, Prannay and Teterwak, Piotr and Wang, Chen and Sarna, Aaron and Tian, Yonglong and Isola, Phillip and Maschinot, Aaron and Liu, Ce and Krishnan, Dilip},
 booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
 editor = {H. Larochelle and M. Ranzato and R. Hadsell and M.F. Balcan and H. Lin},
 pages = {18661--18673},
 publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
 title = {Supervised Contrastive Learning},
 url = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2020/file/d89a66c7c80a29b1bdbab0f2a1a94af8-Paper.pdf},
 volume = {33},
 year = {2020}
}
@inproceedings{li-etal-2020-dice,
    title = "Dice Loss for Data-imbalanced {NLP} Tasks",
    author = "Li, Xiaoya  and
      Sun, Xiaofei  and
      Meng, Yuxian  and
      Liang, Junjun  and
      Wu, Fei  and
      Li, Jiwei",
    editor = "Jurafsky, Dan  and
      Chai, Joyce  and
      Schluter, Natalie  and
      Tetreault, Joel",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.45",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.45",
    pages = "465--476",
    abstract = "Many NLP tasks such as tagging and machine reading comprehension are faced with the severe data imbalance issue: negative examples significantly outnumber positive examples, and the huge number of easy-negative examples overwhelms the training. The most commonly used cross entropy (CE) criteria is actually an accuracy-oriented objective, and thus creates a discrepancy between training and test: at training time, each training instance contributes equally to the objective function, while at test time F1 score concerns more about positive examples. In this paper, we propose to use dice loss in replacement of the standard cross-entropy objective for data-imbalanced NLP tasks. Dice loss is based on the S{\o}rensen{--}Dice coefficient or Tversky index , which attaches similar importance to false positives and false negatives, and is more immune to the data-imbalance issue. To further alleviate the dominating influence from easy-negative examples in training, we propose to associate training examples with dynamically adjusted weights to deemphasize easy-negative examples. Theoretical analysis shows that this strategy narrows down the gap between the F1 score in evaluation and the dice loss in training. With the proposed training objective, we observe significant performance boost on a wide range of data imbalanced NLP tasks. Notably, we are able to achieve SOTA results on CTB5, CTB6 and UD1.4 for the part of speech tagging task; SOTA results on CoNLL03, OntoNotes5.0, MSRA and OntoNotes4.0 for the named entity recognition task; along with competitive results on the tasks of machine reading comprehension and paraphrase identification.",
}
@inproceedings{lin2017focal,
  title={Focal loss for dense object detection},
  author={Lin, Tsung-Yi and Goyal, Priya and Girshick, Ross and He, Kaiming and Doll{\'a}r, Piotr},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision},
  pages={2980--2988},
  year={2017}
}
@inproceedings{chen-etal-2023-ynu,
    title = "{YNU}-{HPCC} at {S}em{E}val-2023 Task 6: {LEGAL}-{BERT} Based Hierarchical {B}i{LSTM} with {CRF} for Rhetorical Roles Prediction",
    author = "Chen, Yu  and
      Zhang, You  and
      Wang, Jin  and
      Zhang, Xuejie",
    editor = {Ojha, Atul Kr.  and
      Do{\u{g}}ru{\"o}z, A. Seza  and
      Da San Martino, Giovanni  and
      Tayyar Madabushi, Harish  and
      Kumar, Ritesh  and
      Sartori, Elisa},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.286",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.semeval-1.286",
    pages = "2075--2081",
    abstract = "To understand a legal document for real-world applications, SemEval-2023 Task 6 proposes a shared Subtask A, rhetorical roles (RRs) prediction, which requires a system to automatically assign a RR label for each semantical segment in a legal text. In this paper, we propose a LEGAL-BERT based hierarchical BiLSTM model with conditional random field (CRF) for RR prediction, which primarily consists of two parts: word-level and sentence-level encoders. The word-level encoder first adopts a legal-domain pre-trained language model, LEGAL-BERT, initially word-embedding words in each sentence in a document and a word-level BiLSTM further encoding such sentence representation. The sentence-level encoder then uses an attentive pooling method for sentence embedding and a sentence-level BiLSTM for document modeling. Finally, a CRF is utilized to predict RRs for each sentence. The officially released results show that our method outperformed the baseline systems. Our team won 7th rank out of 27 participants in Subtask A.",
}
@inproceedings{ma-etal-2021-ynu,
    title = "{YNU}-{HPCC} at {S}em{E}val-2021 Task 11: Using a {BERT} Model to Extract Contributions from {NLP} Scholarly Articles",
    author = "Ma, Xinge  and
      Wang, Jin  and
      Zhang, Xuejie",
    editor = "Palmer, Alexis  and
      Schneider, Nathan  and
      Schluter, Natalie  and
      Emerson, Guy  and
      Herbelot, Aurelie  and
      Zhu, Xiaodan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.semeval-1.58",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.semeval-1.58",
    pages = "478--484",
    abstract = "This paper describes the system we built as the YNU-HPCC team in the SemEval-2021 Task 11: NLPContributionGraph. This task involves first identifying sentences in the given natural language processing (NLP) scholarly articles that reflect research contributions through binary classification; then identifying the core scientific terms and their relation phrases from these contribution sentences by sequence labeling; and finally, these scientific terms and relation phrases are categorized, identified, and organized into subject-predicate-object triples to form a knowledge graph with the help of multiclass classification and multi-label classification. We developed a system for this task using a pre-trained language representation model called BERT that stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, and achieved good results. The average F1-score for Evaluation Phase 2, Part 1 was 0.4562 and ranked 7th, and the average F1-score for Evaluation Phase 2, Part 2 was 0.6541, and also ranked 7th.",
}
@inproceedings{chen-etal-2023-ynu,
    title = "{YNU}-{HPCC} at {S}em{E}val-2023 Task 6: {LEGAL}-{BERT} Based Hierarchical {B}i{LSTM} with {CRF} for Rhetorical Roles Prediction",
    author = "Chen, Yu  and
      Zhang, You  and
      Wang, Jin  and
      Zhang, Xuejie",
    editor = {Ojha, Atul Kr.  and
      Do{\u{g}}ru{\"o}z, A. Seza  and
      Da San Martino, Giovanni  and
      Tayyar Madabushi, Harish  and
      Kumar, Ritesh  and
      Sartori, Elisa},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.286",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.semeval-1.286",
    pages = "2075--2081",
    abstract = "To understand a legal document for real-world applications, SemEval-2023 Task 6 proposes a shared Subtask A, rhetorical roles (RRs) prediction, which requires a system to automatically assign a RR label for each semantical segment in a legal text. In this paper, we propose a LEGAL-BERT based hierarchical BiLSTM model with conditional random field (CRF) for RR prediction, which primarily consists of two parts: word-level and sentence-level encoders. The word-level encoder first adopts a legal-domain pre-trained language model, LEGAL-BERT, initially word-embedding words in each sentence in a document and a word-level BiLSTM further encoding such sentence representation. The sentence-level encoder then uses an attentive pooling method for sentence embedding and a sentence-level BiLSTM for document modeling. Finally, a CRF is utilized to predict RRs for each sentence. The officially released results show that our method outperformed the baseline systems. Our team won 7th rank out of 27 participants in Subtask A.",
}
