Laws and their interpretations, legal arguments and agreements\ are typically expressed in writing, leading to the production of vast corpora of legal text. Their analysis, which is at the center of legal practice, becomes increasingly elaborate as these collections grow in size. Natural language understanding (NLU) technologies can be a valuable tool to support legal practitioners in these endeavors. Their usefulness, however, largely depends on whether current state-of-the-art models can generalize across various tasks in the legal domain. To answer this currently open question, we introduce the Legal General Language Understanding Evaluation (LexGLUE) benchmark, a collection of datasets for evaluating model performance across a diverse set of legal NLU tasks in a standardized way. We also provide an evaluation and analysis of several generic and legal-oriented models demonstrating that the latter consistently offer performance improvements across multiple tasks.

Digital technology started to have revolutionary effects on hearing aids in 2006. Greg Kuykendall, a managing partner at Kuykendall Hearing Aid Center in Enid, said the rapid development of computer chip technology has had a profound impact on the hearing aid industry. "There have been new improvements every year since 2006," Kuykendall said. "If you remember the old analog hearing aids, they would squeal due to feedback occasionally. In '06, computer chips in hearing aids allowed audiologists to isolate the problem frequency and squelch feedback."