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Argument Reasoning in Civil Procedure

Legal argument reasoning task from SemEval-2024 Task 5. Given a short introduction to a U.S. civil procedure topic, a question, and a candidate answer (a possible solution argument), annotators perform binary classification: judge whether the answer candidate is correct (True) or incorrect (False). Questions and answers are drawn from a civil procedure textbook widely used in U.S. law schools.

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Configuration Fileconfig.yaml

This Potato config reproduces the annotation task. Save it as config.yaml and run potato start config.yaml to try it.

yaml
# Argument Reasoning in Civil Procedure
# Based on SemEval-2024 Task 5 (Held & Habernal, 2024)
# Paper: https://aclanthology.org/2024.semeval-1.276/
# Dataset: https://github.com/trusthlt/legal-argument-reasoning-task
#
# Given a short introduction to a U.S. civil procedure topic, a question,
# and a single candidate answer (a possible solution argument), annotators
# perform BINARY classification: judge whether the answer candidate is
# correct (True) or incorrect (False).

annotation_task_name: "Argument Reasoning in Civil Procedure"
task_dir: "."

data_files:
  - sample-data.json

item_properties:
  id_key: "id"
  text_key: "text"

output_annotation_dir: "annotation_output/"
output_annotation_format: "json"

port: 8000
server_name: localhost

annotation_schemes:
  - annotation_type: radio
    name: answer_correctness
    description: "Is the candidate answer a correct solution to the question?"
    labels:
      - "Correct"
      - "Incorrect"
    keyboard_shortcuts:
      "Correct": "1"
      "Incorrect": "2"
    tooltips:
      "Correct": "The candidate answer correctly resolves the question (True)."
      "Incorrect": "The candidate answer does not correctly resolve the question (False)."

annotation_instructions: |
  You will be shown a short introduction to a topic in U.S. civil procedure,
  a specific question, and a single candidate answer (a possible solution
  argument). Your task is to:
  1. Read the introduction to understand the legal context.
  2. Read the question carefully.
  3. Read the candidate answer.
  4. Decide whether the candidate answer is a correct solution to the
     question. Select "Correct" (True) if it correctly resolves the question,
     or "Incorrect" (False) if it does not.

html_layout: |
  <div style="padding: 15px; max-width: 800px; margin: auto;">
    <div style="background: #f0f9ff; border: 1px solid #bae6fd; border-radius: 8px; padding: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px;">
      <strong style="color: #0369a1;">Introduction:</strong>
      <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.7; margin: 8px 0 0 0;">{{introduction}}</p>
    </div>
    <div style="background: #fefce8; border: 1px solid #fde68a; border-radius: 8px; padding: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px;">
      <strong style="color: #a16207;">Question:</strong>
      <p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.7; margin: 8px 0 0 0;">{{text}}</p>
    </div>
    <div style="background: #f0fdf4; border: 1px solid #bbf7d0; border-radius: 8px; padding: 16px; margin-bottom: 16px;">
      <strong style="color: #15803d;">Candidate Answer:</strong>
      <p style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.7; margin: 8px 0 0 0;">{{answer_candidate}}</p>
    </div>
  </div>

allow_all_users: true
instances_per_annotator: 50
annotation_per_instance: 2
allow_skip: true
skip_reason_required: false

Sample Datasample-data.json

json
[
  {
    "id": "civpro_001",
    "introduction": "Federal courts have subject-matter jurisdiction over cases between citizens of different states only when the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000. Diversity must be complete: no plaintiff may share a state of citizenship with any defendant.",
    "text": "A plaintiff from State A sues a defendant from State B in federal court for breach of contract, alleging $60,000 in damages. The defendant moves to dismiss for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction. Is the following answer correct?",
    "answer_candidate": "The court should grant the motion. Although the parties are completely diverse, the amount in controversy does not exceed the $75,000 statutory threshold, so diversity jurisdiction is not available and no other basis for federal jurisdiction is presented."
  },
  {
    "id": "civpro_002",
    "introduction": "Venue governs which court within a system may hear a case, and is analytically distinct from personal jurisdiction. In state court, venue is set by state statute and often lies where a party resides or where the events occurred.",
    "text": "A driver domiciled in California causes an accident in Nevada. The injured Nevada pedestrian sues in California state court, and the driver moves to dismiss for improper venue. Is the following answer correct?",
    "answer_candidate": "The motion should be granted because venue is proper only where the injury occurred, which was Nevada, so a California court is an improper venue for the suit."
  }
]

// ... and 8 more items

Get This Design

View on GitHub

Clone or download from the repository

Quick start:

git clone https://github.com/davidjurgens/potato-showcase.git
cd potato-showcase/semeval/2024/task05-argument-civil-procedure
potato start config.yaml

Dataset & paper

Held & Habernal, SemEval 2024

Citation (BibTeX)

bibtex
@inproceedings{held-habernal-2024-semeval,
    title = "{S}em{E}val-2024 Task 5: Argument Reasoning in Civil Procedure",
    author = "Held, Lena and Habernal, Ivan",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)",
    year = "2024",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    pages = "2027--2038",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.semeval-1.276",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.semeval-1.276/"
}

Details

Annotation Types

radio

Domain

SemEvalNLPLegalArgumentation

Use Cases

Legal ReasoningArgument AnalysisAnswer Validation

Tags

semevalsemeval-2024shared-tasklegalcivil-procedureargumentationbinary-classification

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