@inproceedings{benedetto-etal-2023-politohfi,
    title = "{P}oli{T}o{HFI} at {S}em{E}val-2023 Task 6: Leveraging Entity-Aware and Hierarchical Transformers For Legal Entity Recognition and Court Judgment Prediction",
    author = "Benedetto, Irene  and
      Koudounas, Alkis  and
      Vaiani, Lorenzo  and
      Pastor, Eliana  and
      Baralis, Elena  and
      Cagliero, Luca  and
      Tarasconi, Francesco",
    editor = {Ojha, Atul Kr.  and
      Do{\u{g}}ru{\"o}z, A. Seza  and
      Da San Martino, Giovanni  and
      Tayyar Madabushi, Harish  and
      Kumar, Ritesh  and
      Sartori, Elisa},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.semeval-1.194",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.semeval-1.194",
    pages = "1401--1411",
    abstract = "The use of Natural Language Processing techniques in the legal domain has become established for supporting attorneys and domain experts in content retrieval and decision-making. However, understanding the legal text poses relevant challenges in the recognition of domain-specific entities and the adaptation and explanation of predictive models. This paper addresses the Legal Entity Name Recognition (L-NER) and Court judgment Prediction (CPJ) and Explanation (CJPE) tasks. The L-NER solution explores the use of various transformer-based models, including an entity-aware method attending domain-specific entities. The CJPE proposed method relies on hierarchical BERT-based classifiers combined with local input attribution explainers. We propose a broad comparison of eXplainable AI methodologies along with a novel approach based on NER. For the L-NER task, the experimental results remark on the importance of domain-specific pre-training. For CJP our lightweight solution shows performance in line with existing approaches, and our NER-boosted explanations show promising CJPE results in terms of the conciseness of the prediction explanations.",
}

The use of Natural Language Processing techniques in the legal domain has become established for supporting attorneys and domain experts in content retrieval and decision-making. However, understanding the legal text poses relevant challenges in the recognition of domain-specific entities and the adaptation and explanation of predictive models. This paper addresses the Legal Entity Name Recognition (L-NER) and Court judgment Prediction (CPJ) and Explanation (CJPE) tasks. The L-NER solution explores the use of various transformer-based models, including an entity-aware method attending domain-specific entities. The CJPE proposed method relies on hierarchical BERT-based classifiers combined with local input attribution explainers. We propose a broad comparison of eXplainable AI methodologies along with a novel approach based on NER. For the L-NER task, the experimental results remark on the importance of domain-specific pre-training. For CJP our lightweight solution shows performance in line with existing approaches, and our NER-boosted explanations show promising CJPE results in terms of the conciseness of the prediction explanations.
Benedetto, Irene Koudounas, Alkis Vaiani, Lorenzo Pastor, Eliana Baralis, Elena Cagliero, Luca Tarasconi, Francesco
PoliToHFI at SemEval-2023 Task 6: Leveraging Entity-Aware and Hierarchical Transformers For Legal Entity Recognition and Court Judgment Prediction