Hi! I’m Claire. I am a PhD candidate in NLP at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Michael Rovatsos and Nehal Bhuta, and a Bloomberg PhD Fellow. As part of EdinburghNLP, I am currently collaborating with Pasquale Minervini. I am also affiliated with the Centre for Technomoral Futures. I am interested in information extraction, indirectly supervised learning, domain-specific language models and fairness for NLP. During my Ph.D. project, I am working on advancing legal information extraction with a specific focus on designing and implementing NLP-based functionalities in the legal workflow to inform, speed up, and improve the transparency of the refugee claim process.

Before starting my Ph.D., I worked as a financial analyst and studied at Paris Dauphine University. I have a background in economics and finance and graduated with a master’s of research in computer science in 2021, with a project on generating fairness through explanations in decision-making.

News

• April 2024: BAIPsy 2024 is a student workshop that aims to faciliate discussion and exchange between Artificial Intelligence and Psychology researchers. Deadline for interest registration is the 1st of May, register here
• From May to August 2024, I will be interning at Bloomberg (CTO office) in New York, focusing on information extraction in the legal domain.
• November 27th 2023, NYC, I will be co-organizing a workshop on NLPxFinance at the 4th ACM Conference on AI in Finance - NLP and Network Analysis in Financial Applications. Deadline for submission coming soon, November 10th!
• October 2023, 2 papers accepted at the NLLP workshop, EMNLP 2023! I will present them on December, 7th in Singapore
• October 2023, I will present my work at the Women in HPC workshop hosted at SC2023, Denver, CO
• July 2023, I’m very happy to announce that I received the Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellowship
• July 2023, Our paper presenting a new information extraction pipeline for legal documents was published in ACL Findings
• June 2023, I received the Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award at ICAIL 2023

Research and Publications

Do Language Models Learn about Legal Entity Types during Pretraining?
Claire Barale, Michael Rovatsos, Nehal Bhuta
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop (NLLP) at EMNLP 2023 | paper – slides – poster

AsyLex: A Dataset for Legal Language Processing of Refugee Claims
Claire Barale, Mark Klaisoongnoen, Pasquale Minervini, Michael Rovatsos and Nehal Bhuta
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop (NLLP) at EMNLP 2023 | paper – slides – poster

Automated Refugee Case Analysis: A NLP Pipeline for Supporting Legal Practitioners
Claire Barale, Michael Rovatsos, and Nehal Bhuta
ACL Findings 2023 | paper

fAsyLex: Accelerating Legal NLP through Comparative Analysis of Multi-GPU Approaches
Claire Barale
Women in High Performance Computing Workshop (WHPC) at SC2023 | slides

Empowering Refugee Claimants and their Lawyers: Using Machine Learning to Examine Decision-Making in Refugee Law
Claire Barale
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL) 2023, Doctoral Consortium, Best Paper Award | paper

Human-Centered Computing in Legal NLP - An Application to Refugee Status Determination
Claire Barale
Second Workshop on Bridging Human–Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing at NAACL 2022 | paper

Refugee status determination: how cooperation with machine learning tools can lead to more justice
Claire Barale
Scottish Law and Innovation Network (SCOTLIN) Early Career Scholars Symposium 2022 | paper

What is fair data manipulation?
Alexis Tsoukias, Claire Barale
European Conference on Operational Research, 2021 | presentation

Explanations in decision support – Generating Fairness through explanations
Claire Barale
PSL Université Paris Dauphine, Paris. Masters of Research Dissertation, 2021

Blog Post

Dictionnary Series: What do we mean when we talk about Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
Claire Barale
Data for Children Collaborative, Edinburgh Futures Institute | post