English

Efficient Prompt Optimisation for Legal Text Classification with Proxy Prompt Evaluator

Computation and Language 2025-10-10 v1

Abstract

Prompt optimization aims to systematically refine prompts to enhance a language model's performance on specific tasks. Fairness detection in Terms of Service (ToS) clauses is a challenging legal NLP task that demands carefully crafted prompts to ensure reliable results. However, existing prompt optimization methods are often computationally expensive due to inefficient search strategies and costly prompt candidate scoring. In this paper, we propose a framework that combines Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a proxy prompt evaluator to more effectively explore the prompt space while reducing evaluation costs. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves higher classification accuracy and efficiency than baseline methods under a constrained computation budget.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.08524,
  title  = {Efficient Prompt Optimisation for Legal Text Classification with Proxy Prompt Evaluator},
  author = {Hyunji Lee and Kevin Chenhao Li and Matthias Grabmair and Shanshan Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.08524},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted at NLLP@EMNLP 2025

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:27:30.997Z