On predicting and explaining asylum adjudication

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Abstract

Asylum is a legal protection granted by a state to individuals who demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution or who face real risk of being subjected to torture in their country. However, asylum adjudication often depends on the decision maker’s subjective assessment of the applicant’s credibility. To investigate potential sources of bias in asylum adjudication practices researchers have used statistics and machine learning models, finding significant sources of variation with respect to a number of extra-legal variables. In this paper, we analyse an original dataset of Danish asylum decisions from the Refugee Appeals Board to understand the variables that explain Danish Adjudication. We train a number of classifiers and, while all classifiers agree that candidate credibility is the single most important variable, we find that performance and variable importance change significantly depending on whether data imbalance and temporality are taken into account. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to the theory and practice of predicting and explaining asylum adjudication.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICAIL: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law
Number of pages10
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Publication date2023
Pages217-226
ISBN (Electronic)9798400701979
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, ICAIL 2023 - Braga, Portugal
Duration: 19 Jun 202323 Jun 2023

Conference

Conference19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, ICAIL 2023
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityBraga
Period19/06/202323/06/2023
SponsorCentro Algoritmi, et al., International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law, JUSGOV - Research Center in Justice and Governance, Universidade do Minho Informatics Department at Engineering School, Universidade do Minho Law School
Series19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law, ICAIL 2023 - Proceedings of the Conference

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© ICAIL 2023. All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • Asylum adjudication
  • Data Imbalance
  • Explanatory Modelling
  • Predictive Modelling

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