Singapore

Legal arguments are one of the key aspects of legal knowledge which are expressed in various ways in the unstructured text of court judgements. A large database of past legal arguments can be created by extracting arguments from court judgements, categorizing them, and storing them in a structured format. Such a database would be useful for suggesting suitable arguments for any new case. In this paper, we focus on extracting arguments from Indian Supreme Court judgements using minimal supervision. We first identify a set of certain sentence-level argument markers which are useful for argument extraction such as whether a sentence contains a claim or not, whether a sentence is argumentative in nature, whethe two sentences are part of the same argument, etc. We then model the legal argument extraction problem as a text segmentation problem where we combine multiple weak evidences in the form of argument markers using Integer Linear Programming (ILP), finally arriving at a global document-level solution giving the most optimal legal arguments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique by comparing it against several competent baselines.

EMNLP 2023

Legal Argument Extraction from Court Judgements using Integer Linear Programming

argument extraction

workshop paper

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Mind the Gap: Automated Corpus Creation for Enthymeme Detection and Reconstruction in Learner Arguments | VIDEO

This paper presents an overview of the ImageArg shared task, the first multimodal Argument Mining shared task co-located with the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining at EMNLP 2023. The shared task comprises two classification subtasks - (1) Subtask-A: Argument Stance Classification; (2) Subtask-B: Image Persuasiveness Classification. The former determines the stance of a tweet containing an image and a piece of text toward a controversial topic (e.g., gun control and abortion). The latter determines whether the image makes the tweet text more persuasive. The shared task received 31 submissions for Subtask-A and 21 submissions for Subtask-B from 9 different teams across 6 countries. The top submission in Subtask-A achieved an F1-score of 0.8647 while the best submission in Subtask-B achieved an F1-score of 0.5561.

Overview of ImageArg-2023: The First Shared Task in Multimodal Argument Mining | VIDEO

A main goal of Argument Mining (AM) is to analyze an author's stance. Unlike previous AM datasets focusing only on text, the shared task at the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining introduces a dataset including both text and images. Importantly, these images contain both visual elements and optical characters. Our new framework, TILFA (A Unified Framework for Text, Image, and Layout Fusion in Argument Mining), is designed to handle this mixed data. It excels at not only understanding text but also detecting optical characters and recognizing layout details in images. Our model significantly outperforms existing baselines, earning our team, KnowComp, the 1st place in the leaderboard of Argumentative Stance Classification subtask in this shared task.

Overview of PragTag-2023: Low-Resource Multi-Domain Pragmatic Tagging of Peer Reviews | VIDEO

This paper reports on the submissions of Webis to the two subtasks of ImageArg 2023. For the subtask of argumentative stance classification, we reached an F1 score of 0.84 using a BERT model for sequence classification.
For the subtask of image persuasiveness classification, we reached an F1 score of 0.56 using CLIP embeddings and a neural network model, achieving the best performance for this subtask in the competition. Our analysis reveals that seemingly clear sentences (e.g., ``I support gun control'') are still problematic for our otherwise competitive stance classifier and that ignoring the tweet text for image persuasiveness prediction leads to a model that is similarly effective to our top-performing model.

DeepBlueAI at PragTag-2023:Ensemble-based Text Classification Approaches under Limited Data Resources

To advance argumentative stance prediction as a multimodal problem, the First Shared Task in Multimodal Argument Mining hosted stance prediction in crucial social topics of gun control and abortion. Our exploratory study attempts to evaluate the necessity of images for stance prediction in tweets and compare out- of-the-box text-based large-language models (LLM) in few-shot settings against fine-tuned unimodal and multimodal models. Our work suggests an ensemble of fine-tuned text-based language models (0.817 F1-score) outperforms both the multimodal (0.677 F1-score) and text-based few-shot prediction using a recent state-of-the-art LLM (0.550 F1-score). In addition to the differences in performance, our findings suggest that the multimodal models tend to perform better when image content is summarized as natural language over their native pixel structure and, using in-context examples improves few-shot performance of LLMs.

NUS-IDS at PragTag-2023: Improving Pragmatic Tagging of Peer Reviews through Unlabeled Data

Persuasiveness is a prominent personality trait that measures the extent to which a speaker can impact the beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, and actions of their audience. The ImageArg task is a featured challenge at the 10th ArgMining Workshop during EMNLP 2023, focusing on harnessing the potential of the ImageArg dataset to advance techniques in multimodal persuasion. In this study, we investigate the utilization of dual-modality datasets and evaluate three distinct multi-modality models. By enhancing multi-modality datasets, we demonstrate both the advantages and constraints of cutting-edge models.

SuryaKiran at PragTag 2023 - Benchmarking Domain Adaptation using Masked Language Modeling in Natural Language Processing For Specialized Data

Learning to make effective arguments is vital for the development of critical-thinking in students and, hence, for their academic and career success. Detecting argument components is crucial for developing systems that assess students' ability to develop arguments. Traditionally, supervised learning has been used for this task, but this requires a large corpus of reliable training examples which are often impractical to obtain for student writing. Large language models have also been shown to be effective few-shot learners, making them suitable for low-resource argument detection. However, concerns such as latency, service reliability, and data privacy might hinder their practical applicability. To address these challenges, we present a low-resource classification approach that combines the intrinsic entailment relationship among the argument elements with a parameter-efficient prompt-tuning strategy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in reducing the data and computation requirements of training an argument detection model without compromising the prediction accuracy. This suggests the practical applicability of our model across a variety of real-world settings, facilitating broader access to argument classification for researchers spanning various domains and problem scenarios.

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Next from EMNLP 2023

Mind the Gap: Automated Corpus Creation for Enthymeme Detection and Reconstruction in Learner Arguments | VIDEO