Papers by Federico Ruggeri
Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AMICA is an argument mining-based search engine, specifically designed for the analysis of scient... more AMICA is an argument mining-based search engine, specifically designed for the analysis of scientific literature related to Covid-19. AMICA retrieves scientific papers based on matching keywords and ranks the results based on the papers' argumentative content. An experimental evaluation conducted on a case study in collaboration with the Italian National Institute of Health shows that the AMICA ranking agrees with expert opinion, as well as, importantly, with the impartial quality criteria indicated by Cochrane Systematic Reviews.
Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2020
This paper presents the latest developments of the use of memory network models in detecting and ... more This paper presents the latest developments of the use of memory network models in detecting and explaining unfair terms in online consumer contracts. We extend the CLAUDETTE tool for the detection of potentially unfair clauses in online Terms of Service, by providing to the users the explanations of unfairness (legal rationales) for five different categories: arbitration, unilateral change, content removal, unilateral termination, and limitation of liability.

ArXiv, 2022
The applications of conversational agents for scientific disciplines (as expert domains) are unde... more The applications of conversational agents for scientific disciplines (as expert domains) are understudied due to the lack of dialogue data to train such agents. While most data collection frameworks, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, foster data collection for generic domains by connecting crowd workers and task designers, these frameworks are not much optimized for data collection in expert domains. Scientists are rarely present in these frameworks due to their limited time budget. Therefore, we introduce a novel framework to collect dialogues between scientists as domain experts on scientific papers. Our framework lets scientists present their scientific papers as groundings for dialogues and participate in dialogue they like its paper title. We use our framework to collect a novel argumentative dialogue dataset, ArgSciChat. It consists of 498 messages collected from 41 dialogues on 20 scientific papers. Alongside extensive analysis on ArgSciChat, we evaluate a recent conversational...
Consumer contracts often contain unfair clauses, in apparent violation of the relevant legislatio... more Consumer contracts often contain unfair clauses, in apparent violation of the relevant legislation. In this paper we present a new methodology for evaluating such clauses in online Terms of Services. We expand a set of tagged documents (terms of service), with a structured corpus where unfair clauses are liked to a knowledge base of rationales for unfairness, and experiment with machine learning methods on this expanded training set. Our experimental study is based on deep neural networks that aim to combine learning and reasoning tasks, one major example being Memory Networks. Preliminary results show that this approach may not only provide reasons and explanations to the user, but also enhance the automated detection of unfair clauses.
ArXiv, 2021
Transformers changed modern NLP in many ways. However, they can hardly exploit domain knowledge, ... more Transformers changed modern NLP in many ways. However, they can hardly exploit domain knowledge, and like other blackbox models, they lack interpretability. Unfortunately, structured knowledge injection, in the long run, risks to suffer from a knowledge acquisition bottleneck. We thus propose a memory enhancement of transformer models that makes use of unstructured domain knowledge expressed in plain natural language. An experimental evaluation conducted on two challenging NLP tasks demonstrates that our approach yields better performance and model interpretability than baseline transformer-based architectures.
This paper presents the latest developments of the use of memory network models in detecting and ... more This paper presents the latest developments of the use of memory network models in detecting and explaining unfair terms in online consumer contracts. We extend the CLAUDETTE tool for the detection of potentially unfair clauses in online Terms of Service, by providing to the users the explanations of unfairness (legal rationales) for five different categories: arbitration, unilateral change, content removal, unilateral termination, and limitation of liability.
ArXiv, 2020
Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by suppo... more Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by supporting the automated analysis of legal documents. However, a shortcoming of data-driven approaches is poor explainability. We posit that in this domain useful explanations of classifier outcomes can be provided by resorting to legal rationales. We thus consider several configurations of memory-augmented neural networks where rationales are given a special role in the modeling of context knowledge. Our results show that rationales not only contribute to improve the classification accuracy, but are also able to offer meaningful, natural language explanations of otherwise opaque classifier outcomes.
ArXiv, 2021
We propose a novel architecture for Graph Neural Networks that is inspired by the idea behind Tre... more We propose a novel architecture for Graph Neural Networks that is inspired by the idea behind Tree Kernels of measuring similarity between trees by taking into account their common substructures, named fragments. By imposing a series of regularization constraints to the learning problem, we exploit a pooling mechanism that incorporates such notion of fragments within the node soft assignment function that produces the embeddings. We present an extensive experimental evaluation on a collection of sentence classification tasks conducted on several argument mining corpora, showing that the proposed approach performs well with respect to state-of-the-art techniques.
Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by suppo... more Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by supporting the automated analysis of legal documents. However, a shortcoming of data-driven approaches is poor explainability. We posit that in this domain useful explanations of classifier outcomes can be provided by resorting to legal rationales. We thus consider several configurations of memory-augmented neural networks where rationales are given a special role in the modeling of context knowledge. Our results show that rationales not only contribute to improve the classification accuracy, but are also able to offer meaningful, natural language explanations of otherwise opaque classifier outcomes.
Artificial Intelligence and Law
Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by suppo... more Recent work has demonstrated how data-driven AI methods can leverage consumer protection by supporting the automated analysis of legal documents. However, a shortcoming of data-driven approaches is poor explainability. We posit that in this domain useful explanations of classifier outcomes can be provided by resorting to legal rationales. We thus consider several configurations of memory-augmented neural networks where rationales are given a special role in the modeling of context knowledge. Our results show that rationales not only contribute to improve the classification accuracy, but are also able to offer meaningful, natural language explanations of otherwise opaque classifier outcomes.
SubjectivITA: An Italian Corpus for Subjectivity Detection in Newspapers
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
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Papers by Federico Ruggeri