NLLP 2021

The Natural Legal Language Processing (NLLP) Workshop 2021 was held on November 10, 2021, co-located with the EMNLP 2021 conference. This workshop was organized by a committee comprising experts from various institutions, including the University of Sheffield, Athens University of Economics and Business, Bloomberg Law, Maastricht University, and Bloomberg. The event aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners from the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and law to discuss advancements and challenges in processing legal texts.

The workshop covered a range of topics pertinent to legal NLP, including multilingual analysis of online terms of service, named entity recognition in legal domains, legal judgment prediction benchmarks, and the development of datasets for legal language understanding. Sessions featured presentations on automated extraction of sentencing decisions, legal topic classification, and the creation of language models tailored for legal texts in various languages.

Notable speakers at the event included John Armour from Oxford Law, who discussed access to case law data in the UK, and Sylvie Delacroix from Birmingham Law and the Alan Turing Institute, who presented on data trusts as a bottom-up empowerment tool. The program also included multiple sessions for paper presentations, providing opportunities for attendees to engage with cutting-edge research and developments in the field.

The NLLP Workshop 2021 was particularly relevant for NLP researchers, legal scholars, and practitioners interested in the intersection of law and technology. Attendees had the opportunity to network with peers, discuss collaborative projects, and gain insights into the latest methodologies and applications of NLP in legal contexts.