---
_id: '52841'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: 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.
author:
- first_name: Marius
  full_name: Büttner, Marius
  last_name: Büttner
- first_name: Ivan
  full_name: Habernal, Ivan
  id: '101881'
  last_name: Habernal
citation:
  ama: 'Büttner M, Habernal I. Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil
    law system. In: Graham Y, Purver M, eds. <i>Proceedings of the 18th Conference
    of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume
    1: Long Papers)</i>. Association for Computational Linguistics; 2024:2015–2027.'
  apa: 'Büttner, M., &#38; Habernal, I. (2024). Answering legal questions from laymen
    in German civil law system. In Y. Graham &#38; M. Purver (Eds.), <i>Proceedings
    of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational
    Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</i> (pp. 2015–2027). Association for Computational
    Linguistics.'
  bibtex: '@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} }'
  chicago: 'Büttner, Marius, and Ivan Habernal. “Answering Legal Questions from Laymen
    in German Civil Law System.” In <i>Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European
    Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</i>,
    edited by Yvette Graham and Matthew Purver, 2015–2027. St. Julian{’}s, Malta:
    Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024.'
  ieee: 'M. Büttner and I. Habernal, “Answering legal questions from laymen in German
    civil law system,” in <i>Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter
    of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</i>,
    2024, pp. 2015–2027.'
  mla: 'Büttner, Marius, and Ivan Habernal. “Answering Legal Questions from Laymen
    in German Civil Law System.” <i>Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European
    Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)</i>,
    edited by Yvette Graham and Matthew Purver, Association for Computational Linguistics,
    2024, pp. 2015–2027.'
  short: '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.'
date_created: 2024-03-25T11:27:27Z
date_updated: 2024-03-25T11:28:00Z
editor:
- first_name: Yvette
  full_name: Graham, Yvette
  last_name: Graham
- first_name: Matthew
  full_name: Purver, Matthew
  last_name: Purver
language:
- iso: eng
page: 2015–2027
place: St. Julian{’}s, Malta
publication: 'Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association
  for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)'
publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics
status: public
title: Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system
type: conference
user_id: '15504'
year: '2024'
...