Customizing Contextualized Language Models forLegal Document Reviews

TL;DR

This paper explores how to adapt general pre-trained language models for legal document review tasks, addressing domain-specific challenges and comparing their effectiveness in real-world legal scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces methods for customizing general language models for legal tasks and evaluates their performance and practical considerations.

Findings

Customized models improve legal task accuracy

Practical considerations affect model deployment

Domain-specific tuning enhances performance

Abstract

Inspired by the inductive transfer learning on computer vision, many efforts have been made to train contextualized language models that boost the performance of natural language processing tasks. These models are mostly trained on large general-domain corpora such as news, books, or Wikipedia.Although these pre-trained generic language models well perceive the semantic and syntactic essence of a language structure, exploiting them in a real-world domain-specific scenario still needs some practical considerations to be taken into account such as token distribution shifts, inference time, memory, and their simultaneous proficiency in multiple tasks. In this paper, we focus on the legal domain and present how different language model strained on general-domain corpora can be best customized for multiple legal document reviewing tasks. We compare their efficiencies with respect to task performances and present practical considerations.