JuriBERT: A Masked-Language Model Adaptation for French Legal Text

International audienceLanguage models have proven to be very useful when adapted to specific domains. Nonetheless, little research has been done on the adaptation of domain-specific BERT models in the French language. In this paper, we focus on creating a language model adapted to French legal text with the goal of helping law professionals. We conclude that some specific tasks do not benefit from generic language models pre-trained on large amounts of data. We explore the use of smaller architectures in domain-specific sub-languages and their benefits for French legal text. We prove that domain-specific pre-trained models can perform better than their equivalent generalised ones in the legal domain. Finally, we release JuriBERT, a new set of BERT models adapted to the French legal domain

Computational Indicators in the Legal Profession: Can Artificial Intelligence Measure Lawyers' Performance?

The assessment of the legal professionals’ performance is increasingly important in the market of legal services to provide relevant information both to consumers and to law firms regarding the quality of legal services. In this article, we explore how computational indicators are produced to assess lawyers’ performance in courtroom litigation, analyzing the specific types of information they can generate. We capitalize on artificial intelligence (AI) methods to analyze a sample of 8,045 cases from the French Courts of Appeal, explore different associations involving lawyers, courts, and cases, and assess the strengths and flaws of the resulting metrics to evaluate the performance of legal professionals. The methods we use include natural language processing, machine learning, graph mining and advanced visualization. Based on the examination of the resulting analytics, we uncover both the advantages and challenges of assessing performance in the legal profession through AI methods. We argue that computational indicators need to address deficiencies regarding their methodology and diffusion to users to become effective means of information in the market of legal services. We conclude proposing adjustments to computational indicators and existing regulatory tools to achieve this purpose, seeking to pave the way for further research on this topic

Lex Rosetta : transfer of predictive models across languages, jurisdictions, and legal domains

In this paper, we examine the use of multi-lingual sentence embeddings to transfer predictive models for functional segmentation of adjudicatory decisions across jurisdictions, legal systems (common and civil law), languages, and domains (i.e. contexts). Mechanisms for utilizing linguistic resources outside of their original context have significant potential benefits in AI & Law because differences between legal systems, languages, or traditions often block wider adoption of research outcomes. We analyze the use of Language-Agnostic Sentence Representations in sequence labeling models using Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) that are transferable across languages. To investigate transfer between different contexts we developed an annotation scheme for functional segmentation of adjudicatory decisions. We found that models generalize beyond the contexts on which they were trained (e.g., a model trained on administrative decisions from the US can be applied to criminal law decisions from Italy). Further, we found that training the models on multiple contexts increases robustness and improves overall performance when evaluating on previously unseen contexts. Finally, we found that pooling the training data from all the contexts enhances the models' in-context performance.Comment: 10 page