2,688 research outputs found
Recognizing cited facts and principles in legal judgements
In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles (respectively, Îș=0.65 and Îș=0.95 for inter- and intra-annotator agreement). We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall Îș of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard
ANNIS: a linguistic database for exploring information structure
In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" (ANNotation of Information Structure). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing
Hypotheses, evidence and relationships: The HypER approach for representing scientific knowledge claims
Biological knowledge is increasingly represented as a collection of (entity-relationship-entity) triplets. These are queried, mined, appended to papers, and published. However, this representation ignores the argumentation contained within a paper and the relationships between hypotheses, claims and evidence put forth in the article. In this paper, we propose an alternate view of the research article as a network of 'hypotheses and evidence'. Our knowledge representation focuses on scientific discourse as a rhetorical activity, which leads to a different direction in the development of tools and processes for modeling this discourse. We propose to extract knowledge from the article to allow the construction of a system where a specific scientific claim is connected, through trails of meaningful relationships, to experimental evidence. We discuss some current efforts and future plans in this area
Parsing Argumentation Structures in Persuasive Essays
In this article, we present a novel approach for parsing argumentation
structures. We identify argument components using sequence labeling at the
token level and apply a new joint model for detecting argumentation structures.
The proposed model globally optimizes argument component types and
argumentative relations using integer linear programming. We show that our
model considerably improves the performance of base classifiers and
significantly outperforms challenging heuristic baselines. Moreover, we
introduce a novel corpus of persuasive essays annotated with argumentation
structures. We show that our annotation scheme and annotation guidelines
successfully guide human annotators to substantial agreement. This corpus and
the annotation guidelines are freely available for ensuring reproducibility and
to encourage future research in computational argumentation.Comment: Under review in Computational Linguistics. First submission: 26
October 2015. Revised submission: 15 July 201
Theoretical Grounding for Computer Assisted Scholarly Text Reading (CASTR)
Digital humanities technology has mainly focused its development on scholarly text digitalization and text analysis. It is only recently that attention has been paid to the activity of reading in a computerized environment. Some main causes of this have been the advent of the e-book but more importantly the massive enterprise of text digitalization (such as Gallica, Google Books, World Wide library, and others). In this article, we analyze, in a very exploratory manner, three main dimensions of computer assister scholarly reading of text: the cognitive, the computational and the software dimension. The cognitive dimension of scholarly reading pertains not the nature of reading as a psychological activity but to the complex interpretative act of going through argumentations, narrations, descriptions, demonstrations, dialogues, themes, etc. that are contained in a text
Neural Discourse Structure for Text Categorization
We show that discourse structure, as defined by Rhetorical Structure Theory
and provided by an existing discourse parser, benefits text categorization. Our
approach uses a recursive neural network and a newly proposed attention
mechanism to compute a representation of the text that focuses on salient
content, from the perspective of both RST and the task. Experiments consider
variants of the approach and illustrate its strengths and weaknesses.Comment: ACL 2017 camera ready versio
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