Answer Retrieval in Legal Community Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Askari, Arian, Yang, Zihui, Ren, Zhaochun, Verberne, Suzan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Askari, Arian
Yang, Zihui
Ren, Zhaochun
Verberne, Suzan
author_facet Askari, Arian
Yang, Zihui
Ren, Zhaochun
Verberne, Suzan
contents The task of answer retrieval in the legal domain aims to help users to seek relevant legal advice from massive amounts of professional responses. Two main challenges hinder applying existing answer retrieval approaches in other domains to the legal domain: (1) a huge knowledge gap between lawyers and non-professionals; and (2) a mix of informal and formal content on legal QA websites. To tackle these challenges, we propose CE_FS, a novel cross-encoder (CE) re-ranker based on the fine-grained structured inputs. CE_FS uses additional structured information in the CQA data to improve the effectiveness of cross-encoder re-rankers. Furthermore, we propose LegalQA: a real-world benchmark dataset for evaluating answer retrieval in the legal domain. Experiments conducted on LegalQA show that our proposed method significantly outperforms strong cross-encoder re-rankers fine-tuned on MS MARCO. Our novel finding is that adding the question tags of each question besides the question description and title into the input of cross-encoder re-rankers structurally boosts the rankers' effectiveness. While we study our proposed method in the legal domain, we believe that our method can be applied in similar applications in other domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_04852
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Answer Retrieval in Legal Community Question Answering
Askari, Arian
Yang, Zihui
Ren, Zhaochun
Verberne, Suzan
Information Retrieval
The task of answer retrieval in the legal domain aims to help users to seek relevant legal advice from massive amounts of professional responses. Two main challenges hinder applying existing answer retrieval approaches in other domains to the legal domain: (1) a huge knowledge gap between lawyers and non-professionals; and (2) a mix of informal and formal content on legal QA websites. To tackle these challenges, we propose CE_FS, a novel cross-encoder (CE) re-ranker based on the fine-grained structured inputs. CE_FS uses additional structured information in the CQA data to improve the effectiveness of cross-encoder re-rankers. Furthermore, we propose LegalQA: a real-world benchmark dataset for evaluating answer retrieval in the legal domain. Experiments conducted on LegalQA show that our proposed method significantly outperforms strong cross-encoder re-rankers fine-tuned on MS MARCO. Our novel finding is that adding the question tags of each question besides the question description and title into the input of cross-encoder re-rankers structurally boosts the rankers' effectiveness. While we study our proposed method in the legal domain, we believe that our method can be applied in similar applications in other domains.
title Answer Retrieval in Legal Community Question Answering
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04852