The 14th HIAS Brown Bag Seminar

The HIAS Brown Bag Seminar is a new seminar series hosted by Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study (HIAS).
The seminar series aims to promote interaction between HIAS researchers, faculty members, and students university-wide.
HIAS, with its 11 research centers, will continue to strive to function as a hub to facilitate active research collaboration throughout the University.

*Registration is due 3 PM, 22 January Anyone is welcome to attend!

<If space allows, walk-in participants will be accepted on the day of the event.>

*Bring your own lunch.
<Coffee and snacks will be served.>

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Date: Thursday 23, January, 2025 12:40-13:40 (Presentation + Chat over lunch)

Title: “Exploring the structure of legal language using computational techniques: theories, methods and early results”

Speaker: Simon Deakin (Specially Appointed Professor, HIAS／University of Cambridge, Director of Business Research Center, Professor, Faculty of Law)

Abstract: Advances in machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) are making it possible to explore the structure of legal language in new ways. An emerging claim associated with these studies is that there is an inherent form or structure to legal language, which statistical techniques are rendering visible in ways which were not possible before. Among the techniques being used are those associated with ‘deep learning’ to study large datasets of legal materials. These methods can be used at scale to indicate what appear to be common structural elements to legal corpora, but interpreting the results they generate is not so straightforward, in part because these applications can be, and in practice often are, run in the absence of a prior causal model. Thus it is not clear that the results they produce are always ‘scientific’ in the generally accepted sense of testing hypotheses generated by prior findings or formal models. The ‘explainability’ problem associated with deep learning, meaning the difficulty in discerning in all cases why a particular reweighting of indicators has been arrived at other than its properties in optimising a given pre-defined function, also makes it hard to draw general conclusions, in the nature of new knowledge claims, from some of these studies. However, the inferential or inductive knowledge they generate may still be useful for testing certain claims concerning law as a societal phenomenon. Moreover, deep learning with large datasets is only one application of ML and NLP currently in use. NLP techniques can be deployed in smaller scale studies to test claims of a social scientific nature, concerning the relationship between legal language, on the one hand, and social, economic and behavioural phenomena, on the other. With smaller scale studies involving human (manual) coding of legal data, explainability, by design, is built in. To illustrate this point, consideration will be given to a recent study using the NLP technique of sentiment analysis to analyse the relationship between changes in legal language in the English poor law (equivalent to today’s labour and social security law) during the transition to an industrial economy between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries (Deakin and Shuku, Journal of Law and Society, forthcoming).

Venue: Room 205, Annex.(*) Kunitachi Campus, Hitotsubashi University
(*) No. 5 in this campus map

Language: English

Click HERE to register!

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