Improving Rationales with Small, Inconsistent and Incomplete Data

Data-driven AI systems can make the right decisions for the wrong reasons, which can lead to irresponsible behavior. The rationale of such machine learning models can be evaluated and improved using a previously introduced hybrid method. This method, however, was tested using synthetic data under ideal circumstances, whereas labelled datasets in the legal domain are usually relatively small and often contain missing facts or inconsistencies. In this paper, we therefore investigate rationales under such imperfect conditions. We apply the hybrid method to machine learning models that are trained on court cases, generated from a structured representation of Article 6 of the ECHR, as designed by legal experts. We first evaluate the rationale of our models, and then improve it by creating tailored training datasets. We show that applying the rationale evaluation and improvement method can yield relevant improvements in terms of both performance and soundness of rationale, even under imperfect conditions.