arXiv subjects

Balaji Ganesan

Publications and source records attributed to Balaji Ganesan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

PRecG: Legal Precedent Retrieval with Graph Neural Networks and Rhetorical Role Segmentation

Legal precedent retrieval is a fundamental task in legal case preparation, planning, litigation strategy, and legal research. Current approaches for automatic precedent retrieval map legal documents to a low-dimensional semantic space and compute similarity based on the proximity of their representations. These approaches treat legal documents as monolithic texts, ignoring the rhetorical organization of the legal technicalities. Ergo, they overlook nuanced legal meanings and fail to distinguish the contextual significance of legal entities and concepts that vary based on their rhetorical roles within the document. To address this insufficiency, we propose the PRecG pipeline that computes the similarity between pairs of legal judgments by hierarchically learning their representations. The process begins by decomposing each document into distinct semantic units (segments) based on the rhetorical roles of sentences. For each rhetorical segment, a knowledge graph is constructed to capture the legal entities and their relationships within the segment. Contextual representations of the entities are then learned and aggregated to derive segment-level embeddings. These embeddings are further integrated to produce a unified document-level representation, and finally, the semantic similarity between a pair of documents is computed. We validate the performance of the proposed approach through extensive experiments on a benchmark Indian legal dataset, comparing it against state-of-the-art baselines to demonstrate its effectiveness.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

SIMBA UQ: Similarity-Based Aggregation for Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models

When does a large language model (LLM) know what it does not know? Uncertainty quantification (UQ) provides measures of uncertainty, such as an estimate of the confidence in an LLM's generated output, and is therefore increasingly recognized as a crucial component of trusted AI systems. Black-box UQ methods do not require access to internal model information from the generating LLM and therefore have numerous real-world advantages, such as robustness to system changes, adaptability to choice of LLM, reduced costs, and computational tractability. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of UQ techniques that are primarily but not necessarily entirely black-box, where the consistency between a generated output and other sampled generations is used as a proxy for confidence in its correctness. We propose a high-level non-verbalized similarity-based aggregation framework that subsumes a broad swath of UQ approaches suitable for complex generative tasks, as well as introduce specific novel techniques from the framework that train confidence estimation models using small training sets. Through an empirical study with datasets spanning the diverse tasks of question answering, summarization, and text-to-SQL, we demonstrate that our proposed similarity-based methods can yield better calibrated confidences than baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

The Consistency Hypothesis in Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models

Estimating the confidence of large language model (LLM) outputs is essential for real-world applications requiring high user trust. Black-box uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods, relying solely on model API access, have gained popularity due to their practical benefits. In this paper, we examine the implicit assumption behind several UQ methods, which use generation consistency as a proxy for confidence, an idea we formalize as the consistency hypothesis. We introduce three mathematical statements with corresponding statistical tests to capture variations of this hypothesis and metrics to evaluate LLM output conformity across tasks. Our empirical investigation, spanning 8 benchmark datasets and 3 tasks (question answering, text summarization, and text-to-SQL), highlights the prevalence of the hypothesis under different settings. Among the statements, we highlight the `Sim-Any' hypothesis as the most actionable, and demonstrate how it can be leveraged by proposing data-free black-box UQ methods that aggregate similarities between generations for confidence estimation. These approaches can outperform the closest baselines, showcasing the practical value of the empirically observed consistency hypothesis.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Human Centered AI for Indian Legal Text Analytics

Legal research is a crucial task in the practice of law. It requires intense human effort and intellectual prudence to research a legal case and prepare arguments. Recent boom in generative AI has not translated to proportionate rise in impactful legal applications, because of low trustworthiness and and the scarcity of specialized datasets for training Large Language Models (LLMs). This position paper explores the potential of LLMs within Legal Text Analytics (LTA), highlighting specific areas where the integration of human expertise can significantly enhance their performance to match that of experts. We introduce a novel dataset and describe a human centered, compound AI system that principally incorporates human inputs for performing LTA tasks with LLMs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

xLP: Explainable Link Prediction for Master Data Management

Explaining neural model predictions to users requires creativity. Especially in enterprise applications, where there are costs associated with users' time, and their trust in the model predictions is critical for adoption. For link prediction in master data management, we have built a number of explainability solutions drawing from research in interpretability, fact verification, path ranking, neuro-symbolic reasoning and self-explaining AI. In this demo, we present explanations for link prediction in a creative way, to allow users to choose explanations they are more comfortable with.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Infusing Knowledge into Large Language Models with Contextual Prompts

Knowledge infusion is a promising method for enhancing Large Language Models for domain-specific NLP tasks rather than pre-training models over large data from scratch. These augmented LLMs typically depend on additional pre-training or knowledge prompts from an existing knowledge graph, which is impractical in many applications. In contrast, knowledge infusion directly from relevant documents is more generalisable and alleviates the need for structured knowledge graphs while also being useful for entities that are usually not found in any knowledge graph. With this motivation, we propose a simple yet generalisable approach for knowledge infusion by generating prompts from the context in the input text. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our approach which we evaluate by probing the fine-tuned LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Similar Cases Recommendation using Legal Knowledge Graphs

A legal knowledge graph constructed from court cases, judgments, laws and other legal documents can enable a number of applications like question answering, document similarity, and search. While the use of knowledge graphs for distant supervision in NLP tasks is well researched, using knowledge graphs for applications like case similarity presents challenges. In this work, we describe our solution for predicting similar cases in Indian court judgements. We present our results and also discuss the impact of large language models on this task.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Foundation Model Sherpas: Guiding Foundation Models through Knowledge and Reasoning

Foundation models (FMs) such as large language models have revolutionized the field of AI by showing remarkable performance in various tasks. However, they exhibit numerous limitations that prevent their broader adoption in many real-world systems, which often require a higher bar for trustworthiness and usability. Since FMs are trained using loss functions aimed at reconstructing the training corpus in a self-supervised manner, there is no guarantee that the model's output aligns with users' preferences for a specific task at hand. In this survey paper, we propose a conceptual framework that encapsulates different modes by which agents could interact with FMs and guide them suitably for a set of tasks, particularly through knowledge augmentation and reasoning. Our framework elucidates agent role categories such as updating the underlying FM, assisting with prompting the FM, and evaluating the FM output. We also categorize several state-of-the-art approaches into agent interaction protocols, highlighting the nature and extent of involvement of the various agent roles. The proposed framework provides guidance for future directions to further realize the power of FMs in practical AI systems.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Automated Answer Validation using Text Similarity

Automated answer validation can help improve learning outcomes by providing appropriate feedback to learners, and by making question answering systems and online learning solutions more widely available. There have been some works in science question answering which show that information retrieval methods outperform neural methods, especially in the multiple choice version of this problem. We implement Siamese neural network models and produce a generalised solution to this problem. We compare our supervised model with other text similarity based solutions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

xEM: Explainable Entity Matching in Customer 360

Entity matching in Customer 360 is the task of determining if multiple records represent the same real world entity. Entities are typically people, organizations, locations, and events represented as attributed nodes in a graph, though they can also be represented as records in relational data. While probabilistic matching engines and artificial neural network models exist for this task, explaining entity matching has received less attention. In this demo, we present our Explainable Entity Matching (xEM) system and discuss the different AI/ML considerations that went into its implementation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2022

Document Structure aware Relational Graph Convolutional Networks for Ontology Population

Ontologies comprising of concepts, their attributes, and relationships are used in many knowledge based AI systems. While there have been efforts towards populating domain specific ontologies, we examine the role of document structure in learning ontological relationships between concepts in any document corpus. Inspired by ideas from hypernym discovery and explainability, our method performs about 15 points more accurate than a stand-alone R-GCN model for this task.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Reimagining GNN Explanations with ideas from Tabular Data

Explainability techniques for Graph Neural Networks still have a long way to go compared to explanations available for both neural and decision decision tree-based models trained on tabular data. Using a task that straddles both graphs and tabular data, namely Entity Matching, we comment on key aspects of explainability that are missing in GNN model explanations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Towards Automated Evaluation of Explanations in Graph Neural Networks

Explaining Graph Neural Networks predictions to end users of AI applications in easily understandable terms remains an unsolved problem. In particular, we do not have well developed methods for automatically evaluating explanations, in ways that are closer to how users consume those explanations. Based on recent application trends and our own experiences in real world problems, we propose automatic evaluation approaches for GNN Explanations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2020

Explainable Link Prediction for Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing

Contact Tracing has been used to identify people who were in close proximity to those infected with SARS-Cov2 coronavirus. A number of digital contract tracing applications have been introduced to facilitate or complement physical contact tracing. However, there are a number of privacy issues in the implementation of contract tracing applications, which make people reluctant to install or update their infection status on these applications. In this concept paper, we present ideas from Graph Neural Networks and explainability, that could improve trust in these applications, and encourage adoption by people.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Link Prediction using Graph Neural Networks for Master Data Management

Learning graph representations of n-ary relational data has a number of real world applications like anti-money laundering, fraud detection, and customer due diligence. Contact tracing of COVID19 positive persons could also be posed as a Link Prediction problem. Predicting links between people using Graph Neural Networks requires careful ethical and privacy considerations than in domains where GNNs have typically been applied so far. We introduce novel methods for anonymizing data, model training, explainability and verification for Link Prediction in Master Data Management, and discuss our results.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Data Augmentation for Personal Knowledge Base Population

Cold start knowledge base population (KBP) is the problem of populating a knowledge base from unstructured documents. While artificial neural networks have led to significant improvements in the different tasks that are part of KBP, the overall F1 of the end-to-end system remains quite low. This problem is more acute in personal knowledge bases, which present additional challenges with regard to data protection, fairness and privacy. In this work, we present a system that uses rule based annotators and a graph neural network for missing link prediction, to populate a more complete, fair and diverse knowledge base from the TACRED dataset.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

A Neural Architecture for Person Ontology population

A person ontology comprising concepts, attributes and relationships of people has a number of applications in data protection, didentification, population of knowledge graphs for business intelligence and fraud prevention. While artificial neural networks have led to improvements in Entity Recognition, Entity Classification, and Relation Extraction, creating an ontology largely remains a manual process, because it requires a fixed set of semantic relations between concepts. In this work, we present a system for automatically populating a person ontology graph from unstructured data using neural models for Entity Classification and Relation Extraction. We introduce a new dataset for these tasks and discuss our results.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Collective Learning From Diverse Datasets for Entity Typing in the Wild

Entity typing (ET) is the problem of assigning labels to given entity mentions in a sentence. Existing works for ET require knowledge about the domain and target label set for a given test instance. ET in the absence of such knowledge is a novel problem that we address as ET in the wild. We hypothesize that the solution to this problem is to build supervised models that generalize better on the ET task as a whole, rather than a specific dataset. In this direction, we propose a Collective Learning Framework (CLF), which enables learning from diverse datasets in a unified way. The CLF first creates a unified hierarchical label set (UHLS) and a label mapping by aggregating label information from all available datasets. Then it builds a single neural network classifier using UHLS, label mapping, and a partial loss function. The single classifier predicts the finest possible label across all available domains even though these labels may not be present in any domain-specific dataset. We also propose a set of evaluation schemes and metrics to evaluate the performance of models in this novel problem. Extensive experimentation on seven diverse real-world datasets demonstrates the efficacy of our CLF.

cs.CL↗