Hi there,
Could you please distribute the following job offer? Thanks.
Best,
Pascal -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We invite applications for a 3-year PhD position co-funded by Inria, the French national research institute in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, and LexisNexis France, leader of legal information in France and subsidiary of the RELX Group.
The overall objective of this project is to develop an automated system for detecting argumentation structures in French legal decisions, using recent machine learning-based approaches (i.e. deep learning approaches). In the general case, these structures take the form of a directed labeled graph, whose nodes are the elements of the text (propositions or groups of propositions, not necessarily contiguous) which serve as components of the argument, and edges are relations that signal the argumentative connection between them (e.g., support, offensive). By revealing the argumentation structure behind legal decisions, such a system will provide a crucial milestone towards their detailed understanding, their use by legal professionals, and above all contributes to greater transparency of justice.
The main challenges and milestones of this project start with the creation and release of a large-scale dataset of French legal decisions annotated with argumentation structures. To minimize the manual annotation effort, we will resort to semi-supervised and transfer learning techniques to leverage existing argument mining corpora, such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) corpus, as well as annotations already started by LexisNexis. Another promising research direction, which is likely to improve over state-of-the-art approaches, is to better model the dependencies between the different sub-tasks (argument span detection, argument typing, etc.) instead of learning these tasks independently. A third research avenue is to find innovative ways to inject the domain knowledge (in particular the rich legal ontology developed by LexisNexis) to enrich enrich the representations used in these models. Finally, we would like to take advantage of other discourse structures, such as coreference and rhetorical relations, conceived as auxiliary tasks in a multi-tasking architecture.
The successful candidate holds a Master's degree in computational linguistics, natural language processing, machine learning, ideally with prior experience in legal document processing and discourse processing. Furthermore, the candidate will provide strong programming skills, expertise in machine learning approaches and is eager to work at the interplay between academia and industry.
The position is affiliated with the MAGNET [1], a research group at Inria, Lille, which has expertise in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, in particular Discourse Processing. The PhD student will also work in close collaboration with the R&D team at LexisNexis France, who will provide their expertise in the legal domain and the data they have collected.
Applications will be considered until the position is filled. However, you are encouraged to apply early as we shall start processing the applications as and when they are received. Applications, written in English or French, should include a brief cover letter with research interests and vision, a CV (including your contact address, work experience, publications), and contact information for at least 2 referees. Applications (and questions) should be sent to Pascal Denis (pascal.denis@inria.fr).
The starting date of the position is 1 November 2022 or soon thereafter, for a total of 3 full years.
Best regards,
Pascal Denis
[1] https://team.inria.fr/magnet/ [2] https://www.lexisnexis.fr/