Zero-shot Transfer of Article-aware Legal Outcome Classification for European Court of Human Rights Cases

T. Y.S.S. Santosh, Oana Ichim, Matthias Grabmair

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we cast Legal Judgment Prediction on European Court of Human Rights cases into an article-aware classification task, where the case outcome is classified from a combined input of case facts and convention articles. This configuration facilitates the model learning some legal reasoning ability in mapping article text to specific case fact text. It also provides an opportunity to evaluate the model’s ability to generalize to zero-shot settings when asked to classify the case outcome with respect to articles not seen during training. We devise zero-shot experiments and apply domain adaptation methods based on domain discrimination and Wasserstein distance. Our results demonstrate that the article-aware architecture outperforms straightforward fact classification. We also find that domain adaptation methods improve zero-shot transfer performance, with article relatedness and encoder pre-training influencing the effect.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEACL 2023 - 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Findings of EACL 2023
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages593-605
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781959429470
StatePublished - 2023
Event17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2023 - Findings of EACL 2023 - Dubrovnik, Croatia
Duration: 2 May 20236 May 2023

Publication series

NameEACL 2023 - 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Findings of EACL 2023

Conference

Conference17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL 2023 - Findings of EACL 2023
Country/TerritoryCroatia
CityDubrovnik
Period2/05/236/05/23

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