Sublanguage: A Serious Issue Affects Pretrained Models in Legal Domain

Abstract

Legal English is a sublanguage that is important for everyone but not for everyone to understand. Pretrained models have become best practices among current deep learning approaches for different problems. It would be a waste or even a danger if these models were applied in practice without knowledge of the sublanguage of the law. In this paper, we raise the issue and propose a trivial solution by introducing BERTLaw a legal sublanguage pretrained model. The paper's experiments demonstrate the superior effectiveness of the method compared to the baseline pretrained model