alea-institute/alea-doc-classify

ALEA Document Classification

Classic document and topic classification over U.S. legal and government text. Each example shows a verbatim passage from a public-record document with its identifying header, title or heading removed. It then asks what kind of document the passage comes from, or who issued it. The gold label comes from document metadata or document structure, never from a model.

The data was built for mid-training of ALEA language models. Every example is a complete training document: an instruction or user turn, the passage, the answer options, and a short answer.

Tasks

kind	question	label source	options	docs
usc_title	Which title of the U.S. Code contains this section?	U.S. Code title of the section	4 title names	3,479
contract_type	What type of agreement is this excerpt from? (material contracts filed as EX-10 exhibits with the SEC)	the exhibit's own title line, which is cut from the passage	4 of 10 categories	3,453
gov_agency	Which agency's website is this page from?	the page's .gov host	4 agency names	2,698
fr_agency	Which department or agency issued this Federal Register document?	Federal Register agency metadata	4 department / agency names	1,007
fr_doctype	Is this Federal Register document a rule, a proposed rule, or a notice?	Federal Register document type, checked against the ACTION line	3	675
cfr_title	Which title of the Code of Federal Regulations contains this section?	CFR title of the section	4 title names	634

The contract categories are: employment agreement; credit or loan agreement; lease; purchase or merger agreement; license agreement; separation or release agreement; indemnification agreement; equity plan or award agreement; consulting agreement; guaranty.

How the gold was made and checked

• Passages are verbatim, contiguous cuts of whole paragraphs; text is never edited. The line that states the answer is never shown: the Federal Register header and ACTION line, the U.S. Code / CFR heading and title lines, the contract's title line, and the page URL.
• The label must be inferable from the passage shown. Rows that fail this check are dropped:
  • fr_agency, gov_agency: the passage names the issuing department, one of its sub-agencies, or its acronym, and names no distractor. The full agency name never appears in the first ~300 characters or on a heading / byline line, and no URL containing the agency's domain is shown; it can appear later in body prose.
  • fr_doctype: the SUMMARY / DATES block must describe itself: "this rule ... is effective", "is proposing ... comments must be received", or "this notice announces".
  • contract_type: the passage uses the category's role terms (Landlord / Tenant, Borrower / Lender, Licensor / Licensee, Indemnitee, Optionee ...) and none of a distractor category's role terms. Table-of-contents windows are dropped.
  • usc_title, cfr_title: an out-of-fold lexical classifier must rank the gold title above all three distractors. Sections that cite their own title by number are dropped.
• Distractors are of the same type and format as the gold: all agency names, all title names, or all categories. They are drawn so that each label appears as a distractor about as often as it appears as the answer.

Answer formats and presentation

Answers come in several formats:

• a letter;
• a letter and the option text (the letter written exactly as in the option list, e.g. "(D)" or "D.");
• the option text alone;
• one short sentence;
• a JSON object, used only when the instruction asks for one and names its key.

Each kind has ten instruction wordings. Documents are rendered as plain text (39%), question / answer frames (30%) and chat turns (30%). About 3% of examples include one or two worked examples from other documents. Their answers never equal the target's answer or letter, and they are never in JSON.

Composition (11,946 documents, 7.20M tokens)

source	docs	share
U.S. Code sections	3,479	29.1%
SEC EDGAR material contracts (EX-10)	3,453	28.9%
federal agency websites (.gov)	2,698	22.6%
Federal Register	1,682	14.1%
Code of Federal Regulations	634	5.3%

No single source exceeds 30% of documents. No single title, agency, filer or website exceeds 5%; the largest is U.S. Code title 10 at 3.3%. Labels are capped per kind, and fr_doctype is exactly balanced, also within passage-length bins. The median document is 682 tokens and the longest is 1,401.

Shortcut checks

The checks below are 5-fold cross-validated logistic-regression baselines on cue-only input. Every one is within about 5 points of the chance prior.

• Instruction text only: for example, fr_doctype 0.30 against a prior of 0.33.
• Option text only: for example, contract_type 0.28 against 0.25.
• Passage length only.
• Gold position: the most frequent letter is chosen 25–28% of the time with 4 options, and 34% with 3.
• Longest or shortest option.

Sources and filtering

All passages come from public-record documents in the KL3M corpus:

• the Federal Register;
• the U.S. Code;
• the eCFR;
• SEC EDGAR exhibit filings;
• U.S. federal agency websites.

Party, company, official and agency names are left as published.

Filtering:

• Passages containing e-mail addresses or phone numbers are dropped.
• Every example was screened against evaluation benchmarks and held-out probe sets, at the 8-gram and 13-gram level. Matching examples were removed.
• About 1.5% of source documents are held out and are not in this release.

Review

The builder read 32 released examples against their source metadata: 28 were correct with no issue, 4 had minor issues, and none were wrong. An independent blind review of 60 examples found 1 wrong item: a web page whose byline printed the agency's full name. Rows whose agency name appears in the opening lines, a heading or byline, or a URL of the agency's own domain were then removed, and a second blind review of 60 new examples found 1 wrong item (a website page that names itself repeatedly). Defects found in earlier rounds were fixed by dropping rows or fixing the generator before release.

License

CC BY 4.0. The underlying documents are U.S. government works or public SEC filings.