Multi-language transfer learning for low-resource legal case summarization

Analyzing and evaluating legal case reports are labor-intensive tasks for judges and lawyers, who usually base their decisions on report abstracts, legal principles, and commonsense reasoning. Thus, summarizing legal documents is time-consuming and requires excellent human expertise. Moreover, public legal corpora of specific languages are almost unavailable. This paper proposes a transfer learning approach with extractive and abstractive techniques to cope with the lack of labeled legal summarization datasets, namely a low-resource scenario. In particular, we conducted extensive multi- and cross-language experiments. The proposed work outperforms the state-of-the-art results of extractive summarization on the Australian Legal Case Reports dataset and sets a new baseline for abstractive summarization. Finally, syntactic and semantic metrics assessments have been carried out to evaluate the accuracy and the factual consistency of the machine-generated legal summaries

An overview of information extraction techniques for legal document analysis and processing

In an Indian law system, different courts publish their legal proceedings every month for future reference of legal experts and common people. Extensive manual labor and time are required to analyze and process the information stored in these lengthy complex legal documents. Automatic legal document processing is the solution to overcome drawbacks of manual processing and will be very helpful to the common man for a better understanding of a legal domain. In this paper, we are exploring the recent advances in the field of legal text processing and provide a comparative analysis of approaches used for it. In this work, we have divided the approaches into three classes NLP based, deep learning-based and, KBP based approaches. We have put special emphasis on the KBP approach as we strongly believe that this approach can handle the complexities of the legal domain well. We finally discuss some of the possible future research directions for legal document analysis and processing

European governance challenges in bio-engineering : making perfect life : bio-engineering (in) the 21st century : final report

In the STOA project Making Perfect Life four fields were studied of 21st century bio-engineering: engineering of living artefacts, engineering of the body, engineering of the brain, and engineering of intelligent artefacts. This report describes the main results of the project. It shows how developments in the four fields of bio-engineering are shaped by two megatrends: "biology becoming technology" and "technology becoming biology". These developments result in a broadening of the bio-engineering debate in our society. The report addresses the long term views that are inspiring this debate and discusses a multitude of ethical, legal and social issues that arise from bio-engineering developments in the fields described. Against this background four specific developments are studied in more detail: the rise of human genome sequencing, the market introduction of neurodevices, the capturing by information technology of the psychological and physiological states of users, and the pursuit of standardisation in synthetic biology. These developments are taken in this report as a starting point for an analysis of some of the main European governance challenges in 21st century bio-engineering

Discourse analysis and media texts: a critical reading of analytical tools

Comunicação apresentada na International Conference on Logic and Methodology - International Sociology Association, 33, Germany, Köln, 3-6 October 2000.Under the label of discourse theory and analysis we can find a vast number of standpoints and research programmes. The aims, assumptions and conceptual tools of different works vary widely, with important consequences for the outcomes of research. The main aim of the paper is to discuss and critically assess various strands of discourse analysis and their applicability to media discourse, as well as to present some results of a study of the British press representation of climate change. I will draw on a range of authors such as van Dijk, Fairclough and Gamson, who have promoted discourse analyses of the media, and Hajer and Liftin, who have used discursive approaches to investigate policy-making on environmental issues. A multifaceted analysis of news texts will be conducted. The combination of a theoretical critique with empirical work will lead to proposing a re-assessment and revision of various models. The empirical basis of the paper is a corpus of over 2 000 articles published in the Guardian, Times and Independent between the mid-eighties and 1997

European governance challenges in bio-engineering : making perfect life : bio-engineering (in) the 21st century : final report

In the STOA project Making Perfect Life four fields were studied of 21st century bio-engineering: engineering of living artefacts, engineering of the body, engineering of the brain, and engineering of intelligent artefacts. This report describes the main results of the project. It shows how developments in the four fields of bio-engineering are shaped by two megatrends: "biology becoming technology" and "technology becoming biology". These developments result in a broadening of the bio-engineering debate in our society. The report addresses the long term views that are inspiring this debate and discusses a multitude of ethical, legal and social issues that arise from bio-engineering developments in the fields described. Against this background four specific developments are studied in more detail: the rise of human genome sequencing, the market introduction of neurodevices, the capturing by information technology of the psychological and physiological states of users, and the pursuit of standardisation in synthetic biology. These developments are taken in this report as a starting point for an analysis of some of the main European governance challenges in 21st century bio-engineering

Preparing synthetic biology for the world

abstract: Synthetic Biology promises low-cost, exponentially scalable products and global health solutions in the form of self-replicating organisms, or “living devices.” As these promises are realized, proof-of-concept systems will gradually migrate from tightly regulated laboratory or industrial environments into private spaces as, for instance, probiotic health products, food, and even do-it-yourself bioengineered systems. What additional steps, if any, should be taken before releasing engineered self-replicating organisms into a broader user space? In this review, we explain how studies of genetically modified organisms lay groundwork for the future landscape of biosafety. Early in the design process, biological engineers are anticipating potential hazards and developing innovative tools to mitigate risk. Here, we survey lessons learned, ongoing efforts to engineer intrinsic biocontainment, and how different stakeholders in synthetic biology can act to accomplish best practices for biosafety.View the article as published at http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2013.00005/ful

Framing Public Discussion of Gay Civil Unions

Although the framing of public opinion has often been conceptualized as a collective and social process, experimental studies of framing have typically examined only individual, psychological responses to alternative message frames. In this research we employ for the first time group conversations as the unit of analysis (following Gamson 1992) in an experimental study of framing effects. Two hundred and thirty-five American citizens in 50 groups (17 homogeneously conservative groups, 15 homogeneously liberal groups, and 18 heterogeneous groups) discussed whether or not gay and lesbian partnerships should be legally recognized. Groups were randomly assigned to one of two framing conditions (a homosexual marriage/special rights frame or a civil union/equal rights frame). Results indicated framing effects that were, in all cases, contingent on the ideological leanings of the group. The marriage frame tended to polarize group discussions along ideological lines. Both liberal and conservative groups appeared to find their opponents\u27 frame more provocative, responding to them with a larger number of statements and expressing greater ambivalence than when reacting to more hospitable frames