用Transformer从美国法典中自动提取定义,准确率超98%。
Transformer-Based Extraction of Statutory Definitions from the U.S. Code
- 基于法律领域BERT模型识别定义段落
- 96.8%精确率、98.9%召回率,F1达98.2%
- 适合法律AI研究者与司法数据工程人员
从法律文本中自动提取定义对提升复杂法律语料(如美国法典)的理解与清晰度至关重要。本文提出一种基于Transformer的NLP系统,可自动抽取美国法典中被定义术语、其定义内容及适用范围。针对超过20万页联邦立法文本的复杂性,系统采用微调后的法律领域BERT模型(Legal-BERT),结合文档结构分析与注意力机制,分阶段处理XML格式的美国法典。首先通过微调模型判断段落是否含定义,再聚合相关段落形成定义单元,并运用注意力与规则模式提取术语及其管辖范围。在多个法典标题的数千个定义上评估,最佳模型实现96.8%精确率、98.9%召回率(F1-score 98.2%),显著优于传统机器学习方法。本工作提升了法律信息可访问性,为下游法律推理任务奠定基础。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Automatic extraction of definitions from legal texts is critical for enhancing the comprehension and clarity of complex legal corpora such as the United States Code (U.S.C.). We present an advanced NLP system leveraging transformer-based architectures to automatically extract defined terms, their definitions, and their scope from the U.S.C. We address the challenges of automatically identifying legal definitions, extracting defined terms, and determining their scope within this complex corpus of over 200,000 pages of federal statutory law. Building upon previous feature-based machine learning methods, our updated model employs domain-specific transformers (Legal-BERT) fine-tuned specifically for statutory texts, significantly improving extraction accuracy. Our work implements a multi-stage pipeline that combines document structure analysis with state-of-the-art language models to process legal text from the XML version of the U.S. Code. Each paragraph is first classified using a fine-tuned legal domain BERT model to determine if it contains a definition. Our system then aggregates related paragraphs into coherent definitional units and applies a combination of attention mechanisms and rule-based patterns to extract defined terms and their jurisdictional scope. The definition extraction system is evaluated on multiple titles of the U.S. Code containing thousands of definitions, demonstrating significant improvements over previous approaches. Our best model achieves 96.8% precision and 98.9% recall (98.2% F1-score), substantially outperforming traditional machine learning classifiers. This work contributes to improving accessibility and understanding of legal information while establishing a foundation for downstream legal reasoning tasks.
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