Enabling Ethical Human-AI Reasoning in International Law

Project dates (estimated):

October 2021 - September 2025

Name of the PhD student:

Claire Barale 

Supervisors:

Michael Rovatsos – School of Informatics
Nehal Bhuta - Law School

Project aims:

This project explores how AI can help "augment" human reasoning, using machine learning and natural language processing models. My research focuses on an application in human rights law. It aims at helping and supporting all parties involved in refugee status adjudications to make better decisions thanks to data-driven intelligence. It will also explore cognitive processes involved in legal decision making and human-AI interactions.

Disciplines and subfields engaged:

  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning

  • Legal decision making

  • Human-centered computing

  • Cognitive computing

  • AI Ethics

Research Themes:

  • Ethics of Algorithms

    • Bias and Discrimination in Machine Learning Ethics of Algorithmic Decision-Making

    • Algorithmic Accountability and Responsibility

  • Ethics of Human-Machine Interaction

    • Ethics of Automation

    • Ethics of Knowledge Augmentation

  • Emerging Technology and Human Identity

    • AI Automation and Human Autonomy

Related outputs:

Grants and Awards:

  • Awarded the Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellowship starting July 2023.

  • Won the Best Paper Award for, Empowering Refugee Claimants and their Lawyers: Using Machine Learning to Examine Decision-Making in Refugee Law, presented at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law 2023 (ICAIL 2023) Doctoral Consortium.

Publications and Presentations:

  • Claire Barale, Mark Klaisoongnoen, Pasquale Minervini, Michael Rovatsos, and Nehal Bhuta. 2023. AsyLex: A Dataset for Legal Language Processing of Refugee Claims. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2023, pages 244–257, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics. 🔗

  • Claire Barale, Michael Rovatsos, and Nehal Bhuta. 2023. Do Language Models Learn about Legal Entity Types during Pretraining?. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2023, pages 25–37, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics. 🔗

  • Co-organized a workshop, NLP and Network Analysis in Financial Applications, at the 4th ACM Conference on AI in Finance held on November 7th 2023 in New York.

  • Presented, fAsyLex: Accelerating Legal NLP through Comparative Analysis of Multi-GPU Approaches, at the Women in High Performance Computing Workshop (WHPC) at SC2023, Denver, CO.

  • Automated Refugee Case Analysis: An NLP Pipeline for Supporting Legal Practitioners, Claire Barale, Michael Rovatsos, and Nehal Bhuta, Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023, Toronto, Canada 🔗

  • Human-centered computing in legal NLP - An application to refugee status determination, Claire Barale, Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Bridging Human–Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing, 2022 🔗

  • ​Enabling Ethical Human-AI Reasoning in International Law, talk by Claire Barale, Artificial Intelligence and its Applications Institute (AIAI) Seminar 20 June 2022.

PhD ResearchCTMF AdminEthics of HMI