Analyzing Vietnamese Legal Questions Using Deep Neural Networks with Biaffine Classifiers
This addresses the need for automated question answering in the legal domain for Vietnamese, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like graph-based dependency parsing and pre-trained language models.
The paper tackles the problem of extracting important information segments from Vietnamese legal questions using a deep neural network model with biaffine classifiers, achieving a 94.79% F1 score on a public dataset and outperforming previous work by a large margin.
In this paper, we propose using deep neural networks to extract important information from Vietnamese legal questions, a fundamental task towards building a question answering system in the legal domain. Given a legal question in natural language, the goal is to extract all the segments that contain the needed information to answer the question. We introduce a deep model that solves the task in three stages. First, our model leverages recent advanced autoencoding language models to produce contextual word embeddings, which are then combined with character-level and POS-tag information to form word representations. Next, bidirectional long short-term memory networks are employed to capture the relations among words and generate sentence-level representations. At the third stage, borrowing ideas from graph-based dependency parsing methods which provide a global view on the input sentence, we use biaffine classifiers to estimate the probability of each pair of start-end words to be an important segment. Experimental results on a public Vietnamese legal dataset show that our model outperforms the previous work by a large margin, achieving 94.79% in the F1 score. The results also prove the effectiveness of using contextual features extracted from pre-trained language models combined with other types of features such as character-level and POS-tag features when training on a limited dataset.