Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system
M. Büttner, I. Habernal, in: Y. Graham, M. Purver (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), Association for Computational Linguistics, St. Julian{’}s, Malta, 2024, pp. 2015–2027.
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Conference Paper
| English
Author
Büttner, Marius;
Habernal, IvanLibreCat
Editor
Graham, Yvette;
Purver, Matthew
Abstract
What is preventing us from building a NLP system that could help real people in real situations, for instance when they need legal advice but don{’}t understand law? This question is trickier than one might think, because legal systems vary from country to country, so do the law books, availability of data, and incomprehensibility of legalese. In this paper we focus Germany (which employs the civil-law system where, roughly speaking, interpretation of law codes dominates over precedence) and lay a foundational work to address the laymen{’}s legal question answering empirically. We create GerLayQA, a new dataset comprising of 21k laymen{’}s legal questions paired with answers from lawyers and grounded to concrete law book paragraphs. We experiment with a variety of retrieval and answer generation models and provide an in-depth analysis of limitations, which helps us to provide first empirical answers to the question above.
Publishing Year
Proceedings Title
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Page
2015–2027
LibreCat-ID
Cite this
Büttner M, Habernal I. Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system. In: Graham Y, Purver M, eds. Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Association for Computational Linguistics; 2024:2015–2027.
Büttner, M., & Habernal, I. (2024). Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system. In Y. Graham & M. Purver (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 2015–2027). Association for Computational Linguistics.
@inproceedings{Büttner_Habernal_2024, place={St. Julian{’}s, Malta}, title={Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)}, publisher={Association for Computational Linguistics}, author={Büttner, Marius and Habernal, Ivan}, editor={Graham, Yvette and Purver, Matthew}, year={2024}, pages={2015–2027} }
Büttner, Marius, and Ivan Habernal. “Answering Legal Questions from Laymen in German Civil Law System.” In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), edited by Yvette Graham and Matthew Purver, 2015–2027. St. Julian{’}s, Malta: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024.
M. Büttner and I. Habernal, “Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system,” in Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 2024, pp. 2015–2027.
Büttner, Marius, and Ivan Habernal. “Answering Legal Questions from Laymen in German Civil Law System.” Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), edited by Yvette Graham and Matthew Purver, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024, pp. 2015–2027.
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