Scalable Methods for Annotating Legal-Decision Corpora

Lisa Ferro, John Aberdeen, Karl Branting, Craig Pfeifer, Alexander Yeh, Amartya Chakraborty


Abstract
Recent research has demonstrated that judicial and administrative decisions can be predicted by machine-learning models trained on prior decisions. However, to have any practical application, these predictions must be explainable, which in turn requires modeling a rich set of features. Such approaches face a roadblock if the knowledge engineering required to create these features is not scalable. We present an approach to developing a feature-rich corpus of administrative rulings about domain name disputes, an approach which leverages a small amount of manual annotation and prototypical patterns present in the case documents to automatically extend feature labels to the entire corpus. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we report results from systems trained on this dataset.
Anthology ID:
W19-2202
Volume:
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2019
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Nikolaos Aletras, Elliott Ash, Leslie Barrett, Daniel Chen, Adam Meyers, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, David Rosenberg, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12–20
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2202
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-2202
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lisa Ferro, John Aberdeen, Karl Branting, Craig Pfeifer, Alexander Yeh, and Amartya Chakraborty. 2019. Scalable Methods for Annotating Legal-Decision Corpora. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2019, pages 12–20, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Scalable Methods for Annotating Legal-Decision Corpora (Ferro et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2202.pdf