Deliverable 3.3 - Semantic Processing and ML/DL procedures. The Intelligent Interface Design - DEUCE Project

The object of this document is the description of the semantic processing and ML/DL components, which were developed within DEUCE and are now released on the project GitHub page at this link:

https://github.com/Uzarel/deuce_difficulty_assessment. 

The European Payment Order (EPO) and the European Enforcement Order (EEO) currently operate based on standard forms. Specifically, the EPO procedure allows creditors to recover their uncontested civil and commercial claims according to a uniform procedure that operates on the basis of standard forms. The procedure does not require presence before the court. The claimant only has to submit his application, after which the procedure will lead its own life. It does not require any further formalities or intervention on the part of the claimant. EPO procedure includes seven standard forms: Application for a European order for payment (Form A), Request to the claimant to complete and/or rectify an application for a European order for payment (Form B), Proposal to the claimant to modify an application for a European order for payment (Form C), Decision to reject the application for a European order for payment (Form D), European order for payment (Form E), Opposition to a European order for payment (Form F), Declaration of enforceability (Form G).

The EEO procedure can be used for uncontested cross-border claims. It can accompany a judgment, a court settlement or an authentic instrument and it allows this judgment, settlement or instrument to freely circulate in the European Union, by being easily recognised and enforced in another Member State. To have a judgment certified as a European Enforcement Order (EEO), the judge uses a standard form. Once the European Enforcement Order has been issued by the court, it must be sent to the enforcement authority of the Member State where the debtor lives or where his/her assets are. EEO procedure includes six forms: European enforcement order certificate - judgment (hereinafter “Form A”), European enforcement order certificate - court settlement, European enforcement order certificate - authentic instrument, Certificate of lack or limitation of enforceability, European enforcement order replacement certificate following a challenge, Application for rectification or withdrawal of the european enforcement order certificate. The simplification work focused on Form A for both the EPO and EEO procedures, as it is the document containing the largest amount of text and the one that end users are required to complete. The process was carried out on the English, Italian and German versions of the forms. The adopted approach operates at both the lexical and discourse levels and relies on state-of-the-art generative language models. Its final implementation also incorporates feedback provided by domain experts as well as non-expert end users. First, Section 3 explains the overall strategy adopted for simplifying the text of the European Payment Order (EPO) and European Enforcement Order (EEO) forms. This includes the analysis of the available textual material, the adoption of a mixed LLM- based and expert-driven methodology, and the two complementary simplification levels: lexical and discourse. The lexical simplification process focused on identifying difficult legal terms through quantitative difficulty indices, selecting cross-linguistic candidate terms, and producing aligned definitions and synonyms in English, Italian and German. The discourse-level simplification involved a readability analysis across forms and languages, followed by the generation of simplified text options using GPT-based models. Section 4 discusses the feedback collected from expert and non-expert users from Project Partners Adiconsum, ZEV and EUBF through a targeted survey and explains how this feedback was integrated into the final interface design. Finally, the deliverable concludes with a description of the interface design, illustrating how the simplified content is embedded into the prototype through features such as switchable simplified texts, definitions of selected most complex terms, synonym panels, integrated PDFs, and other usability enhancements (Section 5).