EMNLP 2023long findings0 citations

Can ChatGPT Perform Reasoning Using the IRAC Method in Analyzing Legal Scenarios Like a Lawyer?

Xiaoxi Kang, Lizhen Qu, Lay-Ki Soon, Adnan Trakic, Terry Yue Zhuo, Patrick Charles Emerton, Genevieve Grant

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have drawn a lot of attentions recently in the legal domain due to its emergent ability to tackle a variety of legal tasks. However, it is still unknown if LLMs are able to analyze a legal case and perform reasoning in the same manner as lawyers. Therefore, we constructed a novel corpus consisting of scenarios pertain to Contract Acts Malaysia and Australian Social Act for Dependent Child. ChatGPT is applied to perform analysis on the corpus using the IRAC method, which is a framework widely used by legal professionals for organizing legal analysis. Each scenario in the corpus is annotated with a complete IRAC analysis in a semi-structured format so that both machines and legal professionals are able to interpret and understand the annotations. In addition, we conducted the first empirical assessment of ChatGPT for IRAC analysis in order to understand how well it aligns with the analysis of legal professionals. Our experimental results shed lights on possible future research directions to improve alignments between LLMs and legal experts in terms of legal reasoning.

Legal ReasoningIRAC methodNatural Language ProcessingGenerative Language ModelsIn-context LearningQuestion Decomposition
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
kang2023can,
title={Can Chat{GPT} Perform Reasoning Using the {IRAC} Method in Analyzing Legal Scenarios Like a Lawyer?},
author={Xiaoxi Kang and Lizhen Qu and Lay-Ki Soon and Adnan Trakic and Terry Yue Zhuo and Patrick Charles Emerton and Genevieve Grant},
booktitle={The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
year={2023},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=7okuG5JhaM}
}
Can ChatGPT Perform Reasoning Using the IRAC Method in Analyzing Legal Scenarios Like a Lawyer? · EMNLP 2023