Papers by Oana Ichim
Through the Lens of Split Vote: Exploring Disagreement, Difficulty and Calibration in Legal Case Outcome Classification (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for NLP calibration ignore inherent human label variation (HLV) split votes are a problem in high-stakes domains such as legal and medical decisions . |
| Approach: | They present a case outcome classification dataset with judges' vote distributions and build a taxonomy of disagreement with SV-specific subcategories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared against a judge vote distribution and assesses the alignment of perceived difficulty between models and humans. |
AQuAECHR: Attributed Question Answering for European Court of Human Rights (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | LLMs are widely used for information seeking, but their generated responses often suffer from hallucinations, hindering their widespread adoption in high stakes domains such as law. |
| Approach: | They propose to attribute legal question answering to an actual source to improve factuality and verifiability of the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the factuality and verifiability of legal question answering by combining a dataset from ECHR case law guides with an LLM-based filtering pipeline. |
LexGenie: Automated Generation of Structured Reports for European Court of Human Rights Case Law (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts focus on automatic summarization of individual cases, which condense the content of a single case, making it easier for legal professionals to grasp key points. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to generate multi-case structured reports using entire body of case law on user-specified topics within the European Court of Human Rights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates structured reports that enhance efficient, scalable legal analysis. |
CoCoLex: Confidence-guided Copy-based Decoding for Grounded Legal Text Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Santosh T.y.s.s, Youssef Tarek Elkhayat, Oana Ichim, Pranav Shetty, Dongsheng Wang, Zhiqiang Ma, Armineh Nourbakhsh, Xiaomo Liu
| Challenge: | LLMs can provide key benefits to the Legal domain, but their adoption has been hindered by their tendency to generate unfaithful, ungrounded, or hallucinatory outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Confidence-guided copy-based decoding strategy that dynamically interpolates the model produced vocabulary distribution with a distribution derived based on copying from the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing context-aware decoding methods on five legal benchmarks. |
From Dissonance to Insights: Dissecting Disagreements in Rationale Construction for Case Outcome Classification (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work in explainable COC has been limited to annotations by a single expert. |
| Approach: | They construct a two-level task-independent taxonomy from a dataset obtained from two experts in the domain of international human rights law . they find disagreements stem from underspecification of the legal context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first in legal NLP that focuses on human label variation. |
Zero-shot Transfer of Article-aware Legal Outcome Classification for European Court of Human Rights Cases (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is a classification task that uses textual descriptions of case facts as the input. |
| Approach: | They propose to use legal reasoning to map article text to specific case fact text to improve the model's generalization to zero-shot settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms straightforward fact classification and improves zero-shot transfer performance. |
Deconfounding Legal Judgment Prediction for European Court of Human Rights Cases Towards Better Alignment with Experts (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Legal Judgement Prediction systems without expert-informed adjustments can be vulnerable to shallow, distracting surface signals. |
| Approach: | They propose to use domain expertise to identify statistically predictive but legally irrelevant information and adopt adversarial training to prevent it from relying on it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model aligns better with expert rationales than baseline models . the results are compared with an existing benchmark dataset of human rights cases . |
VECHR: A Dataset for Explainable and Robust Classification of Vulnerability Type in the European Court of Human Rights (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on the concept of vulnerability at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has focused on classification and analysis of textual data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an expert-annotated multi-label dataset to assess vulnerability in court cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on out-of-domain data and shows that it is robust. |