On the Ethical Limits of Natural Language Processing on Legal Text
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2105.02751v2
- Date: Sat, 8 May 2021 10:05:17 GMT
- Title: On the Ethical Limits of Natural Language Processing on Legal Text
- Authors: Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis, Nikolaos Aletras
- Abstract summary: We argue that researchers struggle when it comes to identifying ethical limits to using natural language processing systems.
We place emphasis on three crucial normative parameters which have, to the best of our knowledge, been underestimated by current debates.
For each of these three parameters we provide specific recommendations for the legal NLP community.
- Score: 9.147707153504117
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) methods for analyzing legal text offer
legal scholars and practitioners a range of tools allowing to empirically
analyze law on a large scale. However, researchers seem to struggle when it
comes to identifying ethical limits to using natural language processing (NLP)
systems for acquiring genuine insights both about the law and the systems'
predictive capacity. In this paper we set out a number of ways in which to
think systematically about such issues. We place emphasis on three crucial
normative parameters which have, to the best of our knowledge, been
underestimated by current debates: (a) the importance of academic freedom, (b)
the existence of a wide diversity of legal and ethical norms domestically but
even more so internationally and (c) the threat of moralism in research related
to computational law. For each of these three parameters we provide specific
recommendations for the legal NLP community. Our discussion is structured
around the study of a real-life scenario that has prompted recent debate in the
legal NLP research community.
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