# Comparing the Performance of NLP Toolkits and Evaluation measures in Legal Tech

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11792 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11792/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00512/) (2019)
- [Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.0850/) (2013)
- [SemEval-2019 Task 6: Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media (OffensEval)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08983/) (2019)
- [HateBERT: Retraining BERT for Abusive Language Detection in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12472/) (2020)
- [Semi-supervised Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.01432/) (2015)
- [LEGAL-BERT: The Muppets straight out of Law School](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02559/) (2020)
- [Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.02226/) (2016)
- [Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.06146/) (2018)
- [Legal Area Classification: A Comparative Study of Text Classifiers on Singapore Supreme Court Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06470/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LegalTurk Optimized BERT for Multi-Label Text Classification and NER](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00648/) (2024)
- [Artificial Intelligence Technology analysis using Artificial Intelligence patent through Deep Learning model and vector space model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11295/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent developments in Natural Language Processing have led to the introduction of state-of-the-art Neural Language Models, enabled with unsupervised transferable learning, using different pretraining objectives. While these models achieve excellent results on the downstream NLP tasks, various domain adaptation techniques can improve their performance on domain-specific tasks. We compare and analyze the pretrained Neural Language Models, XLNet (autoregressive), and BERT (autoencoder) on the Legal Tasks. Results show that XLNet Model performs better on our Sequence Classification task of Legal Opinions Classification, whereas BERT produces better results on the NER task. We use domain-specific pretraining and additional legal vocabulary to adapt BERT Model further to the Legal Domain. We prepared multiple variants of the BERT Model, using both methods and their combination. Comparing our variants of the BERT Model, specializing in the Legal Domain, we conclude that both additional pretraining and vocabulary techniques enhance the BERT model's performance on the Legal Opinions Classification task. Additional legal vocabulary improves BERT's performance on the NER task. Combining the pretraining and vocabulary techniques further improves the final results. Our Legal-Vocab-BERT Model gives the best results on the Legal Opinions Task, outperforming the larger pretrained general Language Models, i.e., BERT-Base and XLNet-Base.