The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects

The Law and NLP: Bridging Disciplinary Disconnects is a conference paper authored by Robert Mahari, Dominik Stammbach, and Elliott Ash, published in December 2023. The paper was presented at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023), organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics.

This work addresses the limited adoption of natural language processing (NLP) tools in legal practice, despite the field's heavy reliance on language. The authors identify a disconnect between the needs of legal practitioners and the focus areas of NLP researchers. They review recent trends in legal NLP literature, highlighting the lack of overlap between the legal NLP community and legal academia. The paper discusses examples of legal NLP tasks that could bridge these disciplinary gaps and suggests underexplored areas for future research.

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a leading international scientific and professional society for individuals working on problems involving natural language and computation. The ACL organizes conferences, publishes journals, and supports research and development in computational linguistics and NLP.