@inproceedings{zanoli-etal-2023-annotators,
    title = "Annotators-in-the-loop: Testing a Novel Annotation Procedure on {I}talian Case Law",
    author = "Zanoli, Emma  and
      Barbini, Matilde  and
      Riva, Davide  and
      Picascia, Sergio  and
      Furiosi, Emanuela  and
      D{'}Ancona, Stefano  and
      Chesi, Cristiano",
    editor = "Prange, Jakob  and
      Friedrich, Annemarie",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVII)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.law-1.12",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.law-1.12",
    pages = "118--128",
    abstract = "The availability of annotated legal corpora is crucial for a number of tasks, such as legal search, legal information retrieval, and predictive justice. Annotation is mostly assumed to be a straightforward task: as long as the annotation scheme is well defined and the guidelines are clear, annotators are expected to agree on the labels. This is not always the case, especially in legal annotation, which can be extremely difficult even for expert annotators. We propose a legal annotation procedure that takes into account annotator certainty and improves it through negotiation. We also collect annotator feedback and show that our approach contributes to a positive annotation environment. Our work invites reflection on often neglected ethical concerns regarding legal annotation.",
}

The availability of annotated legal corpora is crucial for a number of tasks, such as legal search, legal information retrieval, and predictive justice. Annotation is mostly assumed to be a straightforward task: as long as the annotation scheme is well defined and the guidelines are clear, annotators are expected to agree on the labels. This is not always the case, especially in legal annotation, which can be extremely difficult even for expert annotators. We propose a legal annotation procedure that takes into account annotator certainty and improves it through negotiation. We also collect annotator feedback and show that our approach contributes to a positive annotation environment. Our work invites reflection on often neglected ethical concerns regarding legal annotation.
Zanoli, Emma Barbini, Matilde Riva, Davide Picascia, Sergio Furiosi, Emanuela D{'}Ancona, Stefano Chesi, Cristiano
Annotators-in-the-loop: Testing a Novel Annotation Procedure on Italian Case Law