How Much is a Human Right Worth? ECtHR-NPD: A Benchmark for Predicting Non-Pecuniary Damage Awards
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:How Much is a Human Right Worth? ECtHR-NPD: A Benchmark for Predicting Non-Pecuniary Damage Awards
Abstract:Existing legal benchmarks cover diverse tasks, while continuous monetary remedies remain comparatively underexplored. We introduce ECtHR-NPD, to the best of our knowledge, the first benchmark for predicting non-pecuniary damage (NPD) awards at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) from case information when no statutory formula or explicit calculation rule determines the amount. ECtHR-NPD contains 14,575 cases with case-level awards in nominal euros, chronological splits, and a protocol separating target construction from model input. We evaluate a battery of methods, including constant predictors, gradient-boosted trees, retrieval methods, fine-tuned encoder language models (LMs), prompted decoder LMs, and knowledge-augmented agents. Our results show that more sophisticated LM and agentic approaches do not consistently outperform the strongest feature-based baseline. All model families struggle to identify zero awards and to calibrate high-award predictions, with further degradation on the Challenging test view, making ECtHR-NPD a challenging testbed for current state-of-the-art open-weight and proprietary LMs.
| Comments: | EMNLP 2026 main conference paper. 28 pages, 5 figures |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2609.18908 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2609.18908v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.18908
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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