AimeLaw won the Automated Legal Question Answering Competition ALQAC 2021

Date: Nov 19,2021

AimeLaw, a research team from Aimesoft Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Lab (AIMAI Lab), won the first rank and the best presentation award at the Automated Legal Question Answering Competition ALQAC 2021.

This is a competition organized by the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) in association with the International Conference on Knowledge and Systems Engineering (KSE), with the aim of promoting research and development of AI software systems that automatically answer legal questions, helping users quickly find answers of legal questions.

In particular, AimeLaw achieved the best performance award (first rank) in the task of Legal Textual Entailment and two runner-up awards in the tasks of Legal Document Retrieval and Legal Question Answering. In the Legal Textual Entailment task, competitors were required to determine whether a legal statement or query is true or false based on relevant legal articles. Legal Document Retrieval is to retrieve relevant articles to an input legal query. Finally, the Legal Question Answering task is to answer yes/no legal questions and can be solved by combining a legal document retrieval model and a legal textual entailment model. In the competition, by analyzing structural characteristics of legal documents, AimeLaw introduced novel data augmentation and text matching methods to improve the accuracy of the proposed artificial neural network models. The methods proposed by AimeLaw have been shown to be effective in shared tasks at ALQAC 2021.

“We feel highly honored and happy to have won the glorious award and would strive hard to research other great Multimodal AI solutions and apply to help businesses and lives”, said Dr. Minh Pham, Director of AIMAI Lab and leader of the AimeLaw research team.

AIMAI Lab is a research laboratory inside Aimesoft Inc., which focuses on the research and development of Multimodal AI technologies and applications, such as Natural language processing technologies, Speech processing technologies, Computer Vision technologies, and Data mining technologies. The team AimeLaw has a special research interest in legal text analysis.

The success of AimeLaw comes from the efforts of its team members and the leadership of Dr. Minh Pham - Director of AIMAI Lab. The technologies that AimeLaw used in the competition have been applied for various products of Aimesoft.

Previously, Dr. Minh Pham has also achieved many outstanding achievements in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), specifically in the VLSP 2018 and VLSP 2020 workshops, where he achieved excellent awards on Named Entity Recognition (NER), Social Network Mining and Relation Extraction.

About ALQAC:

As an associated event of KSE 2021, ALQAC includes 3 tasks for each language: (1) Legal Document Retrieval, (2) Legal Textual Entailment, and (3) Legal Question Answering. We introduce the Legal Question Answering dataset for the competition – a manually annotated dataset based on well-known statute laws in Vietnamese and Thai Language. Through the competition, they aim to develop a research community on legal support systems. See more details at https://www.jaist.ac.jp/is/labs/nguyen-lab/home/alqac-2021/