An Empirical Study on Cross-X Transfer for Legal Judgment Prediction

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Cross-lingual transfer learning has proven useful in a variety of Natural Language (NLP) tasks, but it is understudied in the context of legal NLP, and not at all in Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP). We explore transfer learning techniques on LJP using the trilingual Swiss-Judgment-Prediction (SJP) dataset, including cases written in three languages. We find that Cross-Lingual Transfer (CLT) improves the overall results across languages, especially when we use adapter-based fine-tuning. Finally, we further improve the model’s performance by augmenting the training dataset with machine-translated versions of the original documents, using a 3× larger training corpus. Further on, we perform an analysis exploring the effect of cross-domain and cross-regional transfer, i.e., train a model across domains (legal areas), or regions. We find that in both settings (legal areas, origin regions), models trained across all groups perform overall better, while they also have improved results in the worst-case scenarios. Finally, we report improved results when we ambitiously apply cross-jurisdiction transfer, where we further augment our dataset with Indian legal cases
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Publication date2022
Pages32–46
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing - Online
Duration: 20 Nov 202223 Nov 2022

Conference

Conference12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
ByOnline
Periode20/11/202223/11/2022

ID: 339157386