Yating Zhang


2023

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Focus-aware Response Generation in Inquiry Conversation
Yiquan Wu | Weiming Lu | Yating Zhang | Adam Jatowt | Jun Feng | Changlong Sun | Fei Wu | Kun Kuang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Inquiry conversation is a common form of conversation that aims to complete the investigation (e.g., court hearing, medical consultation and police interrogation) during which a series of focus shifts occurs. While many models have been proposed to generate a smooth response to a given conversation history, neglecting the focus can limit performance in inquiry conversation where the order of the focuses plays there a key role. In this paper, we investigate the problem of response generation in inquiry conversation by taking the focus into consideration. We propose a novel Focus-aware Response Generation (FRG) method by jointly optimizing a multi-level encoder and a set of focal decoders to generate several candidate responses that correspond to different focuses. Additionally, a focus ranking module is proposed to predict the next focus and rank the candidate responses. Experiments on two orthogonal inquiry conversation datasets (judicial, medical domain) demonstrate that our method generates results significantly better in automatic metrics and human evaluation compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

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Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction
Leilei Gan | Baokui Li | Kun Kuang | Yating Zhang | Lei Wang | Anh Luu | Yi Yang | Fei Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Given the fact description text of a legal case, legal judgment prediction (LJP) aims to predict the case’s charge, applicable law article, and term of penalty. A core problem of LJP is distinguishing confusing legal cases where only subtle text differences exist. Previous studies fail to distinguish different classification errors with a standard cross-entropy classification loss and ignore the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. To tackle these issues, in this work, first, in order to exploit the numbers in legal cases for predicting the term of penalty of certain charges, we enhance the representation of the fact description with extracted crime amounts which are encoded by a pre-trained numeracy model. Second, we propose a moco-based supervised contrastive learning to learn distinguishable representations and explore the best strategy to construct positive example pairs to benefit all three subtasks of LJP simultaneously. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results, particularly for confusing legal cases. Ablation studies also demonstrate the effectiveness of each component.

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Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration
Yiquan Wu | Siying Zhou | Yifei Liu | Weiming Lu | Xiaozhong Liu | Yating Zhang | Changlong Sun | Fei Wu | Kun Kuang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) has become an increasingly crucial task in Legal AI, i.e., predicting the judgment of the case in terms of case fact description. Precedents are the previous legal cases with similar facts, which are the basis for the judgment of the subsequent case in national legal systems. Thus, it is worthwhile to explore the utilization of precedents in the LJP. Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task. These can be broken down into two categories: large language models (LLMs) and domain-specific models. LLMs are capable of interpreting and generating complex natural language, while domain models are efficient in learning task-specific information. In this paper, we propose the precedent-enhanced LJP framework (PLJP) – a system that leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents. Specifically, the domain models are designed to provide candidate labels and find the proper precedents efficiently, and the large models will make the final prediction with an in-context precedents comprehension. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our PLJP. Moreover, our work shows a promising direction for LLM and domain-model collaboration that can be generalized to other vertical domains.

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CDD: A Large Scale Dataset for Legal Intelligence Research
Changzhen Ji | Yating Zhang | Adam Jatowt | Haipang Wu
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

As an important application of Artificial Intelligence, legal intelligence has recently attracted the attention of many researchers. Previous works investigated diverse issues like predicting crimes, predicting outcomes of judicial debates, or extracting information/knowledge from various kinds of legal documents. Although many advances have been made, the research on supporting prediction of court judgments remains relatively scarce, while the lack of large-scale data resources limits the development of this research.In this paper, we present a novel, large-size Court Debate Dataset (CDD), which includes 30,481 court cases, totaling 1,144,425 utterances. CDD contains real-world conversations involving judges, plaintiffs and defendants in court trials. To construct this dataset we have invited experienced judges to design appropriate labels for data records. We then asked law school students to provide annotations based on the defined labels. The dataset can be applied to several downstream tasks, such as text summarization, dialogue generation, text classification, etc. We introduce the details of the different tasks in the rapidly developing field of legal intelligence, the research of which can be fostered thanks to our dataset, and we provide the corresponding benchmark performance.

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FEDLEGAL: The First Real-World Federated Learning Benchmark for Legal NLP
Zhuo Zhang | Xiangjing Hu | Jingyuan Zhang | Yating Zhang | Hui Wang | Lizhen Qu | Zenglin Xu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The inevitable private information in legal data necessitates legal artificial intelligence to study privacy-preserving and decentralized learning methods. Federated learning (FL) has merged as a promising technique for multiple participants to collaboratively train a shared model while efficiently protecting the sensitive data of participants. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no work on applying FL to legal NLP. To fill this gap, this paper presents the first real-world FL benchmark for legal NLP, coined FEDLEGAL, which comprises five legal NLP tasks and one privacy task based on the data from Chinese courts. Based on the extensive experiments on these datasets, our results show that FL faces new challenges in terms of real-world non-IID data. The benchmark also encourages researchers to investigate privacy protection using real-world data in the FL setting, as well as deploying models in resource-constrained scenarios. The code and datasets of FEDLEGAL are available here.

2022

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Towards Interactivity and Interpretability: A Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction Framework
Yiquan Wu | Yifei Liu | Weiming Lu | Yating Zhang | Jun Feng | Changlong Sun | Fei Wu | Kun Kuang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is a fundamental task in legal AI, which aims to assist the judge to hear the case and determine the judgment. The legal judgment usually consists of the law article, charge, and term of penalty. In the real trial scenario, the judge usually makes the decision step-by-step: first concludes the rationale according to the case’s facts and then determines the judgment. Recently, many models have been proposed and made tremendous progress in LJP, but most of them adopt an end-to-end manner that cannot be manually intervened by the judge for practical use. Moreover, existing models lack interpretability due to the neglect of rationale in the prediction process. Following the judge’s real trial logic, in this paper, we propose a novel Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction (RLJP) framework. In the RLJP framework, the LJP process is split into two steps. In the first phase, the model generates the rationales according to the fact description. Then it predicts the judgment based on the fact and the generated rationales. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show RLJP achieves the best results compared to the state-of-the-art models. Meanwhile, the proposed framework provides good interactivity and interpretability which enables practical use.

2021

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RepSum: Unsupervised Dialogue Summarization based on Replacement Strategy
Xiyan Fu | Yating Zhang | Tianyi Wang | Xiaozhong Liu | Changlong Sun | Zhenglu Yang
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In the field of dialogue summarization, due to the lack of training data, it is often difficult for supervised summary generation methods to learn vital information from dialogue context with limited data. Several attempts on unsupervised summarization for text by leveraging semantic information solely or auto-encoder strategy (i.e., sentence compression), it however cannot be adapted to the dialogue scene due to the limited words in utterances and huge gap between the dialogue and its summary. In this study, we propose a novel unsupervised strategy to address this challenge, which roots from the hypothetical foundation that a superior summary approximates a replacement of the original dialogue, and they are roughly equivalent for auxiliary (self-supervised) tasks, e.g., dialogue generation. The proposed strategy RepSum is applied to generate both extractive and abstractive summary with the guidance of the followed nˆth utterance generation and classification tasks. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

2020

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De-Biased Court’s View Generation with Causality
Yiquan Wu | Kun Kuang | Yating Zhang | Xiaozhong Liu | Changlong Sun | Jun Xiao | Yueting Zhuang | Luo Si | Fei Wu
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Court’s view generation is a novel but essential task for legal AI, aiming at improving the interpretability of judgment prediction results and enabling automatic legal document generation. While prior text-to-text natural language generation (NLG) approaches can be used to address this problem, neglecting the confounding bias from the data generation mechanism can limit the model performance, and the bias may pollute the learning outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Attentional and Counterfactual based Natural Language Generation (AC-NLG) method, consisting of an attentional encoder and a pair of innovative counterfactual decoders. The attentional encoder leverages the plaintiff’s claim and fact description as input to learn a claim-aware encoder from which the claim-related information in fact description can be emphasized. The counterfactual decoders are employed to eliminate the confounding bias in data and generate judgment-discriminative court’s views (both supportive and non-supportive views) by incorporating with a synergistic judgment predictive model. Comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method under both quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics.

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Cross Copy Network for Dialogue Generation
Changzhen Ji | Xin Zhou | Yating Zhang | Xiaozhong Liu | Changlong Sun | Conghui Zhu | Tiejun Zhao
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In the past few years, audiences from different fields witness the achievements of sequence-to-sequence models (e.g., LSTM+attention, Pointer Generator Networks and Transformer) to enhance dialogue content generation. While content fluency and accuracy often serve as the major indicators for model training, dialogue logics, carrying critical information for some particular domains, are often ignored. Take customer service and court debate dialogue as examples, compatible logics can be observed across different dialogue instances, and this information can provide vital evidence for utterance generation. In this paper, we propose a novel network architecture - Cross Copy Networks (CCN) to explore the current dialog context and similar dialogue instances’ logical structure simultaneously. Experiments with two tasks, court debate and customer service content generation, proved that the proposed algorithm is superior to existing state-of-art content generation models.

2015

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Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit: Connecting Past with Present by Finding Corresponding Terms across Time
Yating Zhang | Adam Jatowt | Sourav Bhowmick | Katsumi Tanaka
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)