Transformer-Based Extraction of Statutory Definitions from the U.S. Code

Automatic extraction of definitions from legal texts is critical for enhancing the comprehension and clarity of complex legal corpora such as the United States Code (U.S.C.). We present an advanced NLP system leveraging transformer-based architectures to automatically extract defined terms, their definitions, and their scope from the U.S.C. We address the challenges of automatically identifying legal definitions, extracting defined terms, and determining their scope within this complex corpus of over 200,000 pages of federal statutory law. Building upon previous feature-based machine learning methods, our updated model employs domain-specific transformers (Legal-BERT) fine-tuned specifically for statutory texts, significantly improving extraction accuracy. Our work implements a multi-stage pipeline that combines document structure analysis with state-of-the-art language models to process legal text from the XML version of the U.S. Code. Each paragraph is first classified using a fine-tuned legal domain BERT model to determine if it contains a definition. Our system then aggregates related paragraphs into coherent definitional units and applies a combination of attention mechanisms and rule-based patterns to extract defined terms and their jurisdictional scope. The definition extraction system is evaluated on multiple titles of the U.S. Code containing thousands of definitions, demonstrating significant improvements over previous approaches. Our best model achieves 96.8% precision and 98.9% recall (98.2% F1-score), substantially outperforming traditional machine learning classifiers. This work contributes to improving accessibility and understanding of legal information while establishing a foundation for downstream legal reasoning tasks.

Group Testing for Accurate and Efficient Range-Based Near Neighbor Search : An Adaptive Binary Splitting Approach

This work presents an adaptive group testing framework for the range-based high dimensional near neighbor search problem. The proposed method detects high-similarity vectors from an extensive collection of high dimensional vectors, where each vector represents an image descriptor. Our method efficiently marks each item in the collection as neighbor or non-neighbor on the basis of a cosine distance threshold without exhaustive search. Like other methods in the domain of large scale retrieval, our approach exploits the assumption that most of the items in the collection are unrelated to the query. Unlike other methods, it does not assume a large difference between the cosine similarity of the query vector with the least related neighbor and that with the least unrelated non-neighbor. Following the procedure of binary splitting, a multi-stage adaptive group testing algorithm, we split the set of items to be searched into half at each step, and perform dot product tests on smaller and smaller subsets, many of which we are able to prune away. We experimentally show that our method achieves a speed-up over exhaustive search by a factor of more than ten with an accuracy same as that of exhaustive search, on a variety of large datasets. We present a theoretical analysis of the expected number of distance computations per query and the probability that a pool with a certain number of members will be pruned. In this way, our method exploits very useful and practical distributional properties unlike other methods. In our method, all required data structures are created purely offline. Moreover, our method does not impose any strong assumptions on the number of true near neighbors, is adaptible to streaming settings where new vectors are dynamically added to the database, and does not require any parameter tuning.

Artificial Intelligence-based Eosinophil Counting in Gastrointestinal Biopsies

Normally eosinophils are present in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract of healthy individuals. When the eosinophils increase beyond their usual amount in the GI tract, a patient gets varied symptoms. Clinicians find it difficult to diagnose this condition called eosinophilia. Early diagnosis can help in treating patients. Histopathology is the gold standard in the diagnosis for this condition. As this is an under-diagnosed condition, counting eosinophils in the GI tract biopsies is important. In this study, we trained and tested a deep neural network based on UNet to detect and count eosinophils in GI tract biopsies. We used connected component analysis to extract the eosinophils. We studied correlation of eosinophilic infiltration counted by AI with a manual count. GI tract biopsy slides were stained with H&E stain. Slides were scanned using a camera attached to a microscope and five high-power field images were taken per slide. Pearson correlation coefficient was 85% between the machine-detected and manual eosinophil counts on 300 held-out (test) images.