Context-Aware Legal Citation Recommendation using Deep Learning

Lawyers and judges spend a large amount of time researching the proper legal authority to cite while drafting decisions. In this paper, we develop a citation recommendation tool that can help improve efficiency in the process of opinion drafting. We train four types of machine learning models, including a citation-list based method (collaborative filtering) and three context-based methods (text similarity, BiLSTM and RoBERTa classifiers). Our experiments show that leveraging local textual context improves recommendation, and that deep neural models achieve decent performance. We show that non-deep text-based methods benefit from access to structured case metadata, but deep models only benefit from such access when predicting from context of insufficient length. We also find that, even after extensive training, RoBERTa does not outperform a recurrent neural model, despite its benefits of pretraining. Our behavior analysis of the RoBERTa model further shows that predictive performance is stable across time and citation classes.

Human Perception of Surprise: A User Study

Understanding how to engage users is a critical question in many applications. Previous research has shown that unexpected or astonishing events can attract user attention, leading to positive outcomes such as engagement and learning. In this work, we investigate the similarity and differences in how people and algorithms rank the surprisingness of facts. Our crowdsourcing study, involving 106 participants, shows that computational models of surprise can be used to artificially induce surprise in humans.