DUTh at SemEval 2024 Task 5: A multi-task learning approach for the Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure

AbstractText-generative models have proven to be good reasoners. Although reasoning abilities are mostly observed in larger language models, a number of strategies try to transfer this skill to smaller language models. This paper presents our approach to SemEval 2024 Task-5: The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure. This shared task aims to develop a system that efficiently handles a multiple-choice question-answering task in the context of the US civil procedure domain. The dataset provides a human-generated rationale for each answer. Given the complexity of legal issues, this task certainly challenges the reasoning abilities of LLMs and AI systems in general. Our work explores fine-tuning an LLM as a correct/incorrect answer classifier. In this context, we are making use of multi-task learning toincorporate the rationales into the fine-tuning process.