Papers for

government policy analysts

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

New dataset enables identifying institutions in international law texts

IntLawNER: A Named Entity Recognition Dataset and Benchmark in International Law

Abstract: International law provides the normative framework through which states coordinate action, regulate armed conflict, and protect human rights, yet its texts remain without token-level named entity recognition (NER) resources. We introduce IntLawNER, a NER dataset and benchmark for codified sources of international law, covering 2,987 gold-annotated sentences and 8,094 entity spans from International Court of Justice (ICJ) decisions, UN Security Council resolutions, and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments, annotated with seven institution-specific entity types. We construct IntLawNER with a cost-effective hybrid algorithmic-agentic pipeline that reduces 468k source sentences to a compact annotation set through candidate retrieval, LLM-based vetting, and human review, with 89.6% of gold spans accepted unchanged from the silver layer. However, the silver-to-gold analysis reveals that human-machine aggregate agreement metrics can be misleading in domain-specific NER: Cohen's kappa=0.964 on boundary-matched spans masks a macro-F1 of 0.753 when missing entities, boundary errors, and label corrections are included. The benchmark shows that zero-shot span-based GLiNER collapses on entity types dependent on institutional function rather than surface form (0.243 micro-F1), while fine-tuned transformers struggle on rare labels. Carefully selected few-shot examples that demonstrate label contrasts improve every LLM over zero-shot prompting, with Claude Opus 4.6 reaching the best score of 0.873 micro-F1. We release IntLawNER as a benchmark and reusable resource for extracting references in international legal texts.

Fri 18 SeptArtificial IntelligenceInformation Retrieval
The gist
International law texts are important but lack detailed labeling of named entities like organizations and courts. The authors created IntLawNER, a dataset with nearly 3,000 sentences from international legal documents annotated with seven types of institution-related entities. They used a mix of automated and human review to build the dataset and found some challenges in how well machines and people agree on annotations. Testing shows that large language models improve when given a few examples, but still struggle with rare labels or types based on function rather than name. This resource helps future tools extract structured information from international law.
Open 2609.22529v1

Model finds dataset mentions in displacement and conflict documents

Extracting Dataset Mentions in Forced Displacement and FCV Documents: A Weakly Supervised Framework with LLM-Based Label Refinement

Abstract: Development and humanitarian organizations produce and support surveys, administrative registries, and other data resources to inform research, policy, and operations, yet systematically identifying where these datasets are referenced remains difficult. Such references are dispersed across research papers, project documents, humanitarian reports, and other unstructured text, limiting both the ability to trace data use and to identify potential gaps in data availability or dissemination. We present a weakly supervised framework for adapting dataset extraction to forced displacement and Fragile, Conflict, and Violence (FCV) documents without first constructing a large manually labeled training corpus. A lightweight model trained on general research literature generates candidate dataset mentions from unlabeled domain documents, which a frontier large language model (LLM) reviews in context, validating or rejecting candidates and correcting their extraction boundaries. The resulting annotations are supplemented with targeted synthetic and contrastive examples and used to fine-tune the lightweight model for large-scale extraction. We evaluate the resulting model on an independent gold-standard benchmark of 1,706 text passages spanning research, humanitarian, and operational documents. Across the full benchmark, the model achieves 74.1\% precision and 70.5\% recall at the mention level; among passages containing dataset references, precision reaches 89.5\%. At the passage level, the model achieves 88.2\% accuracy and 88.6\% specificity in distinguishing passages with dataset references from those without them. These results demonstrate a practical approach for constructing domain-specific supervision when labeled data are limited, and provide a technical foundation for larger-scale analysis of data use and potential gaps in the displacement data landscape.

Thu 10 SeptComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceInformation Retrieval
The gist
It can be hard to find where specific data sources are mentioned in reports about forced displacement and conflict because the information is scattered across many documents. The authors created a method that first guesses dataset mentions using a simple model, then uses a large language AI to check and fix these guesses. This corrected information trains the model better to find dataset mentions across many documents. Their system was tested on a set of over 1,700 passages and showed it can accurately find data mentions most of the time. This helps track how data is used and identify where data might be missing in these important reports.
Open 2609.12107v1