Towards Explainability in Legal Outcome Prediction Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Valvoda, Josef, Cotterell, Ryan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Valvoda, Josef
Cotterell, Ryan
author_facet Valvoda, Josef
Cotterell, Ryan
contents Current legal outcome prediction models - a staple of legal NLP - do not explain their reasoning. However, to employ these models in the real world, human legal actors need to be able to understand the model's decisions. In the case of common law, legal practitioners reason towards the outcome of a case by referring to past case law, known as precedent. We contend that precedent is, therefore, a natural way of facilitating explainability for legal NLP models. In this paper, we contribute a novel method for identifying the precedent employed by legal outcome prediction models. Furthermore, by developing a taxonomy of legal precedent, we are able to compare human judges and neural models with respect to the different types of precedent they rely on. We find that while the models learn to predict outcomes reasonably well, their use of precedent is unlike that of human judges.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_16852
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Explainability in Legal Outcome Prediction Models
Valvoda, Josef
Cotterell, Ryan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Current legal outcome prediction models - a staple of legal NLP - do not explain their reasoning. However, to employ these models in the real world, human legal actors need to be able to understand the model's decisions. In the case of common law, legal practitioners reason towards the outcome of a case by referring to past case law, known as precedent. We contend that precedent is, therefore, a natural way of facilitating explainability for legal NLP models. In this paper, we contribute a novel method for identifying the precedent employed by legal outcome prediction models. Furthermore, by developing a taxonomy of legal precedent, we are able to compare human judges and neural models with respect to the different types of precedent they rely on. We find that while the models learn to predict outcomes reasonably well, their use of precedent is unlike that of human judges.
title Towards Explainability in Legal Outcome Prediction Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16852