Abstract:In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), predicting judicial outcomes poses significant challenges due to the complexity of legal proceedings and the scarcity of expert-annotated datasets. Addressing this, we introduce \textbf{Pred}iction with \textbf{Ex}planation (\texttt{PredEx}), the largest expert-annotated dataset for legal judgment prediction and explanation in the Indian context, featuring over 15,000 annotations. This groundbreaking corpus significantly enhances the training and evaluation of AI models in legal analysis, with innovations including the application of instruction tuning to LLMs. This method has markedly improved the predictive accuracy and explanatory depth of these models for legal judgments. We employed various transformer-based models, tailored for both general and Indian legal contexts. Through rigorous lexical, semantic, and expert assessments, our models effectively leverage \texttt{PredEx} to provide precise predictions and meaningful explanations, establishing it as a valuable benchmark for both the legal profession and the NLP community.
Abstract:This paper describes our submission to the SemEval-2023 for Task 6 on LegalEval: Understanding Legal Texts. Our submission concentrated on three subtasks: Legal Named Entity Recognition (L-NER) for Task-B, Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) for Task-C1, and Court Judgment Prediction with Explanation (CJPE) for Task-C2. We conducted various experiments on these subtasks and presented the results in detail, including data statistics and methodology. It is worth noting that legal tasks, such as those tackled in this research, have been gaining importance due to the increasing need to automate legal analysis and support. Our team obtained competitive rankings of 15$^{th}$, 11$^{th}$, and 1$^{st}$ in Task-B, Task-C1, and Task-C2, respectively, as reported on the leaderboard.
Abstract:Legal question-answering (QA) systems have the potential to revolutionize the way legal professionals interact with case law documents. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of existing artificial intelligence models for their utility in answering legal questions within the Indian legal system, specifically focusing on Indian Legal Question Answering (AILQA) and our study investigates the efficacy of different retrieval and QA algorithms currently available. Utilizing the OpenAI GPT model as a benchmark, along with query prompts, our investigation shows that existing AILQA systems can automatically interpret natural language queries from users and generate highly accurate responses. This research is particularly focused on applications within the Indian criminal justice domain, which has its own set of challenges due to its complexity and resource constraints. In order to rigorously assess the performance of these models, empirical evaluations are complemented by feedback from practicing legal professionals, thereby offering a multifaceted view on the capabilities and limitations of AI in the context of Indian legal question-answering.