Agent-Specific Deontic Modality Detection in Legal Language
This work addresses a bottleneck for laypeople and legal professionals in understanding rights and duties in legal documents, though it is incremental as it builds on existing Transformer-based methods with a new dataset.
The paper tackles the problem of limited annotated datasets for deontic modality detection in legal language by introducing LEXDEMOD, a corpus of English contracts annotated for agent-specific deontic modalities and triggers, and benchmarks it on classification and detection tasks, showing generalization across agreement types and high recall in detecting red flags.
Legal documents are typically long and written in legalese, which makes it particularly difficult for laypeople to understand their rights and duties. While natural language understanding technologies can be valuable in supporting such understanding in the legal domain, the limited availability of datasets annotated for deontic modalities in the legal domain, due to the cost of hiring experts and privacy issues, is a bottleneck. To this end, we introduce, LEXDEMOD, a corpus of English contracts annotated with deontic modality expressed with respect to a contracting party or agent along with the modal triggers. We benchmark this dataset on two tasks: (i) agent-specific multi-label deontic modality classification, and (ii) agent-specific deontic modality and trigger span detection using Transformer-based (Vaswani et al., 2017) language models. Transfer learning experiments show that the linguistic diversity of modal expressions in LEXDEMOD generalizes reasonably from lease to employment and rental agreements. A small case study indicates that a model trained on LEXDEMOD can detect red flags with high recall. We believe our work offers a new research direction for deontic modality detection in the legal domain.