Jaromír Šavelka

Also published as: Jaromir Savelka


2021

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Discovering Explanatory Sentences in Legal Case Decisions Using Pre-trained Language Models
Jaromir Savelka | Kevin Ashley
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Legal texts routinely use concepts that are difficult to understand. Lawyers elaborate on the meaning of such concepts by, among other things, carefully investigating how they have been used in the past. Finding text snippets that mention a particular concept in a useful way is tedious, time-consuming, and hence expensive. We assembled a data set of 26,959 sentences, coming from legal case decisions, and labeled them in terms of their usefulness for explaining selected legal concepts. Using the dataset we study the effectiveness of transformer models pre-trained on large language corpora to detect which of the sentences are useful. In light of models’ predictions, we analyze various linguistic properties of the explanatory sentences as well as their relationship to the legal concept that needs to be explained. We show that the transformer-based models are capable of learning surprisingly sophisticated features and outperform the prior approaches to the task.

2020

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ECHR: Legal Corpus for Argument Mining
Prakash Poudyal | Jaromir Savelka | Aagje Ieven | Marie Francine Moens | Teresa Goncalves | Paulo Quaresma
Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Argument Mining

In this paper, we publicly release an annotated corpus of 42 decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The corpus is annotated in terms of three types of clauses useful in argument mining: premise, conclusion, and non-argument parts of the text. Furthermore, relationships among the premises and conclusions are mapped. We present baselines for three tasks that lead from unstructured texts to structured arguments. The tasks are argument clause recognition, clause relation prediction, and premise/conclusion recognition. Despite a straightforward application of the bidirectional encoders from Transformers (BERT), we obtained very promising results F1 0.765 on argument recognition, 0.511 on relation prediction, and 0.859/0.628 on premise/conclusion recognition). The results suggest the usefulness of pre-trained language models based on deep neural network architectures in argument mining. Because of the simplicity of the baselines, there is ample space for improvement in future work based on the released corpus.

2017

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Sentence Boundary Detection in Adjudicatory Decisions in the United States
Jaromir Savelka | Vern R. Walker | Matthias Grabmair | Kevin D. Ashley
Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 58, Numéro 2 : Traitement automatique de la langue juridique [Legal Natural Language Processing]

2016

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Extracting Case Law Sentences for Argumentation about the Meaning of Statutory Terms
Jaromír Šavelka | Kevin D. Ashley
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining2016)