Smita Ghaisas


2023

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Towards Mitigating Perceived Unfairness in Contracts from a Non-Legal Stakeholder’s Perspective
Anmol Singhal | Preethu Rose Anish | Shirish Karande | Smita Ghaisas
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2023

Commercial contracts are known to be a valuable source for deriving project-specific requirements. However, contract negotiations mainly occur among the legal counsel of the parties involved. The participation of non-legal stakeholders, including requirement analysts, engineers, and solution architects, whose primary responsibility lies in ensuring the seamless implementation of contractual terms, is often indirect and inadequate. Consequently, a significant number of sentences in contractual clauses, though legally accurate, can appear unfair from an implementation perspective to non-legal stakeholders. This perception poses a problem since requirements indicated in the clauses are obligatory and can involve punitive measures and penalties if not implemented as committed in the contract. Therefore, the identification of potentially unfair clauses in contracts becomes crucial. In this work, we conduct an empirical study to analyze the perspectives of different stakeholders regarding contractual fairness. We then investigate the ability of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to identify unfairness in contractual sentences by comparing chain of thought prompting and semi-supervised fine-tuning approaches. Using BERT-based fine-tuning, we achieved an accuracy of 84% on a dataset consisting of proprietary contracts. It outperformed chain of thought prompting using Vicuna-13B by a margin of 9%.

2020

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Hasyarasa at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Quantifying Humor as Departure from Expectedness
Ravi Theja Desetty | Ranit Chatterjee | Smita Ghaisas
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper describes our system submission Hasyarasa for the SemEval-2020 Task-7: Assessing Humor in Edited News Headlines. This task has two subtasks. The goal of Subtask 1 is to predict the mean funniness of the edited headline given the original and the edited headline. In Subtask 2, given two edits on the original headline, the goal is to predict the funnier of the two. We observed that the departure from expected state/ actions of situations/ individuals is the cause of humor in the edited headlines. We propose two novel features: Contextual Semantic Distance and Contextual Neighborhood Distance to estimate this departure and thus capture the contextual absurdity and hence the humor in the edited headlines. We have used these features together with a Bi-LSTM Attention based model and have achieved 0.53310 RMSE for Subtask 1 and 60.19% accuracy for Subtask 2.

2019

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Towards Disambiguating Contracts for their Successful Execution - A Case from Finance Domain
Preethu Rose Anish | Abhishek Sainani | Nitin Ramrakhiyani | Sachin Pawar | Girish K Palshikar | Smita Ghaisas
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Financial Technology and Natural Language Processing