In the modern era of rapidly increasing data volumes, accurately retrieving and recommending relevant documents has become crucial in enhancing the reliability of Question Answering (QA) systems. Recently, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has gained significant recognition for enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by mitigating hallucination issues in QA systems, which is particularly beneficial in the legal domain. Various methods, such as semantic search using dense vector embeddings or a combination of multiple techniques to improve results before feeding them to LLMs, have been proposed. However, these methods often fall short when applied to the Vietnamese language due to several challenges, namely inefficient Vietnamese data processing leading to excessive token length or overly simplistic ensemble techniques that lead to instability and limited improvement. Moreover, a critical issue often overlooked is the ordering of final relevant documents which are used as reference to ensure the accuracy of the answers provided by LLMs. In this report, we introduce our three main modifications taken to address these challenges. First, we explore various practical approaches to data processing to overcome the limitations of the embedding model. Additionally, we enhance Reciprocal Rank Fusion by normalizing order to combine results from keyword and vector searches effectively. We also meticulously re-rank the source pieces of information used by LLMs with Active Retrieval to improve user experience when refining the information generated. In our opinion, this technique can also be considered as a new re-ranking method that might be used in place of the traditional cross encoder. Finally, we integrate these techniques into a comprehensive QA system, significantly improving its performance and reliability
ViHERMES: A Graph-Grounded Multihop Question Answering Benchmark and System for Vietnamese Healthcare Regulations
URA Research Group, Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), VNU-HCM, Vietnam(URA研究组,计算机科学与工程学院,胡志明市技术大学(HCMUT),VNU-HCM,越南)
Optimizing Legal Document Retrieval in Vietnamese with Semi-Hard Negative Mining
Faculty of Computer Science, University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam(信息科技学院计算机科学系,胡志明市,越南);Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam(信息科技学院信息科学与工程系,胡志明市,越南);Laboratory of Multimedia Communications, University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam(信息科技学院多媒体通信实验室,胡志明市,越南);Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam(越南国家大学,胡志明市,越南)
Expert finding has been well-studied in community question answering (QA) systems in various domains. However, none of these studies addresses expert finding in the legal domain, where the goal is for citizens to find lawyers based on their expertise. In the legal domain, there is a large knowledge gap between the experts and the searchers, and the content on the legal QA websites consist of a combination formal and informal communication. In this paper, we propose methods for generating query-dependent textual profiles for lawyers covering several aspects including sentiment, comments, and re…
Macquarie University(麦考瑞大学);Saarland University(萨尔大学);VNU University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi(河内越南国家大学工程技术大学)
Recent years have witnessed a new trend of building ontology-based question answering systems. These systems use semantic web information to produce more precise answers to users' queries. However, these systems are mostly designed for English. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-based question answering system named KbQAS which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one made for Vietnamese. KbQAS employs our question analysis approach that systematically constructs a knowledge base of grammar rules to convert each input question into an intermediate representation element. KbQAS then…
AILQA: Evaluating AI-Driven Legal Question Answering Systems for the Indian Legal System
Indian Institute of Technology(印度理工学院);Symbiosis Law School(共生法学院);Indian Institute of Science Education and Research(印度科学教育与研究学院);University of Birmingham(伯明翰大学)
Attentive Deep Neural Networks for Legal Document Retrieval
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(日本北陆先端科学技术大学院大学);National Institute of Informatics(日本国立信息学研究所);Posts and Telecommunications Institute of Technology(邮电技术学院)
Legal professionals worldwide are currently trying to get up-to-pace with the explosive growth in legal document availability through digital means. This drives a need for high efficiency Legal Information Retrieval (IR) and Question Answering (QA) methods. The IR task in particular has a set of unique challenges that invite the use of semantic motivated NLP techniques. In this work, a two-stage method for Legal Information Retrieval is proposed, combining lexical statistics and distributional sentence representations in the context of Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (CO…
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST)(日本先端科学技术大学院大学);Hung Yen University of Education and Technology (UTEHY)(兴安教育技术大学)
In the context of the Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment (COLIEE), we propose a method comprising the necessary steps for finding relevant documents to a legal question and deciding on textual entailment evidence to provide a correct answer. The proposed method is based on the combination of several lexical and morphological characteristics, to build a language model and a set of features for Machine Learning algorithms. We provide a detailed study on the proposed method performance and failure cases, indicating that it is competitive with state-of-the-art approaches on Leg…
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(北陆先端科学技术大学院大学);VNU University of Engineering and Technology(河内国家大学工程技术大学);Banking Academy of Vietnam(越南银行学院);National Institute of Informatics(国立信息学研究所)
We propose deep learning based methods for automatic systems of legal retrieval and legal question-answering in COLIEE 2020. These systems are all characterized by being pre-trained on large amounts of data before being finetuned for the specified tasks. This approach helps to overcome the data scarcity and achieve good performance, thus can be useful for tackling related problems in information retrieval, and decision support in the legal domain. Besides, the approach can be explored to deal with other domain specific problems.
Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg(马格德堡奥托·冯·格里克大学)
Getting an overview over the legal domain has become challenging, especially in a broad, international context. Legal question answering systems have the potential to alleviate this task by automatically retrieving relevant legal texts for a specific statement and checking whether the meaning of the statement can be inferred from the found documents. We investigate a combination of the BM25 scoring method of Elasticsearch with word embeddings trained on English translations of the German and Japanese civil law. For this, we define criteria which select a dynamic number of relevant documents ac…
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur(印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校)
Acronyms and long-forms are commonly found in research documents, more so in documents from scientific and legal domains. Many acronyms used in such documents are domain-specific and are very rarely found in normal text corpora. Owing to this, transformer-based NLP models often detect OOV (Out of Vocabulary) for acronym tokens, especially for non-English languages, and their performance suffers while linking acronyms to their long forms during extraction. Moreover, pretrained transformer models like BERT are not specialized to handle scientific and legal documents. With these points being the …
LegalRAG: A Hybrid RAG System for Multilingual Legal Information Retrieval
Apurba-NSU R&D Lab, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh(北南大学电气与计算机工程系,北南大学阿普尔巴-NSU研发实验室,达卡,孟加拉国);Apurba Technologies, Sunnyvale, CA 94085, USA(阿普尔巴技术公司,硅谷,加利福尼亚州,美国);Fordham University, New York, USA(福丁大学,纽约,美国)
The necessary of buiding the searching system being able to support users expressing their searching by natural language queries is very important and opens the researching direction with many potential. It combines the traditional methods of information retrieval and the researching of Question Answering (QA). In this paper, we introduce a searching system built by us for searching courses on the Vietnam OpenCourseWare Program (VOCW). It can be considered as the first tool to be able to perform the user's Vietnamese questions. The experiment results are rather good when we evaluate this syste…
Existing work on making privacy policies accessible has explored new presentation forms such as color-coding based on the risk factors or summarization to assist users with conscious agreement. To facilitate a more personalized interaction with the policies, in this work, we propose an automated privacy policy question answering assistant that extracts a summary in response to the input user query. This is a challenging task because users articulate their privacy-related questions in a very different language than the legal language of the policy, making it difficult for the system to understa…
LabourCrew: A Multi-Agent RAG Framework for Trustworthy Adversarial Deliberation and Statutory Reasoning over Labour Law
Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology(阿赫萨努拉科技大学);Jashore University of Science and Technology(杰肖尔科技大学);American International University - Bangladesh(美国国际大学-孟加拉)
GreekBarRetrieval: A Benchmark for Greek Statutory Retrieval
Archimedes, Athena Research Center(阿基米德雅典娜研究中心);Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center(雅典娜研究中心语言与语音处理研究所);Athens University of Economics Business(雅典经济与商业大学)