Altigran Soares da Silva

Arthur Elwing Torres, Edleno Silva de Moura, Altigran Soares da Silva et al.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a machine learning task that traditionally relies on supervised learning and annotated data. Acquiring such data is often a challenge, particularly in specialized fields like medical, legal, and financial sectors. Those are commonly referred to as low-resource domains, which comprise long-tail entities, due to the scarcity of available data. To address this, data augmentation techniques are increasingly being employed to generate additional training instances from the original dataset. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of two prominent text augmentation techniques, Mention Replacement and Contextual Word Replacement, on two widely-used NER models, Bi-LSTM+CRF and BERT. We conduct experiments on four datasets from low-resource domains, and we explore the impact of various combinations of training subset sizes and number of augmented examples. We not only confirm that data augmentation is particularly beneficial for smaller datasets, but we also demonstrate that there is no universally optimal number of augmented examples, i.e., NER practitioners must experiment with different quantities in order to fine-tune their projects.

Marina Soares Marinho, Daniela Vianna, Livy Real et al.

This study presents the Jusbrasil Study on the Use of General-Purpose AIs in Law, proposing an experimental evaluation protocol combining legal theory, such as material correctness, systematic coherence, and argumentative integrity, with empirical assessment by 48 legal professionals. Four systems (JusIA, ChatGPT Free, ChatGPT Pro, and Gemini) were tested in tasks simulating lawyers' daily work. JusIA, a domain-specialized model, consistently outperformed the general-purpose systems, showing that both domain specialization and a theoretically grounded evaluation are essential for reliable legal AI outputs.

Lucas R. C. Pessutto, Tiago de Melo, Viviane P. Moreira et al.

This paper describes the system submitted by our team (BabelEnconding) to SemEval-2020 Task 3: Predicting the Graded Effect of Context in Word Similarity. We propose an approach that relies on translation and multilingual language models in order to compute the contextual similarity between pairs of words. Our hypothesis is that evidence from additional languages can leverage the correlation with the human generated scores. BabelEnconding was applied to both subtasks and ranked among the top-3 in six out of eight task/language combinations and was the highest scoring system three times.