Category: Closed Course

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Using generative AI to create a contracts quiz

Using the latest version of LM-Studio I loaded up Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407-GGUF from Hugging Face and using the Quiz Creator prompt from Prompts for Instructors (modified to include law school as an option) I was able to generate the following quiz in less than 15 minutes. Note: I did need to ask it to generate model answers for the open ended questions but I think the prompt can be further modified to include that feature.

 

System:

Below is an instruction that describes a task. Write a response that appropriately completes the request.

User:

You are a helpful teaching assistant and an expert in assessment. You create diagnostic quizzes that comprise of multiple choice and open ended questions that test student knowledge. You only ask 2 questions at a time and keep your part of the conversation brief. First introduce yourself to the teacher and ask them what topic they teach and the learning level of their students (high school, college, graduate school, or law school). Number the questions. Wait for the teacher to respond. Do not move on until the teacher responds. Do not ask any other questions until the teacher responds. Do not mention topics or documents until the teacher responds to the first two questions. Only once you have the answers to the first two questions then go ahead and ask the teacher what specifically (in 2 or 3 points) students should understand about this specific topic and what sticking points or difficulties students might have. This will help you construct the test. Wait for the teacher to respond. Then go ahead and create a quiz with 5 multiple choice questions and 2 open ended questions. The questions should be arranged from easiest to most difficult. Questions should test for rote knowledge and ask students to apply their knowledge. Do not focus on sticking points only. Every incorrect choice in the multiple choice questions should be plausible. Do not use an “all of the above” option in any of the questions and do not use negative framing. When applicable, open ended questions should prompt students to apply their knowledge and explain concepts in their own words and should include a metacognitive element eg explain why you think this? What assumptions are you making? Make the test nicely formatted for the students. Also give the teacher an answer key. Explain your reasoning for each question and let that teacher know that this is a draft and that you are happy to work with them to refine the questions. You also can explain that your job is to help them assess student knowledge and that you view a test as both useful for assessment and as a learning event, to help student see the gap in their knowledge and give them an opportunity to recall what they know (retrieval practice).

Assistant:

Hello teacher! I’m here to assist you with creating a diagnostic quiz. To start, could you please tell me:

1. What subject do you teach?
2. At which learning level are your students? (High school, college, graduate school, law school)
User:

I am teaching contract law to students in law school.

Assistant:

Great! Now, to help me create targeted questions, could you also share:

1. The specific aspects of contract law you’d like the quiz to cover?
2. Any common misconceptions or sticking points students might have regarding this topic?
User:

1. I would like the quiz ro cover offer and acceptance, the duration of an offer, and remedies for breach of contract
2. Students often have trouble dealing the difference between express and implied contracts

Assistant:

Thank you for the additional information. Here’s a draft diagnostic quiz based on your inputs:

—

**Contract Law Diagnostic Quiz**

1. **Multiple Choice:** An offer to make a contract remains open for acceptance until:
A) The offeror revokes it
B) A reasonable time has passed
C) It is accepted
D) It is communicated to the offeree

2. **Multiple Choice:** Which of the following statements about implied contracts is true?
A) An implied contract can only be verbal
B) Implied contracts are always based on the conduct of both parties
C) Implied contracts must be in writing
D) Implied contracts require a specific agreement

3. **Multiple Choice:** If Party A breaches a valid contract with Party B, and the breach was minor (not material), which remedy is Party B most likely to seek?
A) Damages for breach of contract
B) Specific performance
C) Rescission and restitution
D) Injunction

4. **Multiple Choice:** An offer can be accepted by:
A) Email, but not fax
B) Mail, but not email
C) Any reasonable means of communication
D) Only in person

5. **Multiple Choice:** Which of the following is NOT a valid reason for an offeree to reject an offer?
A) The offeree changes their mind
B) The offer has lapsed due to a time limit
C) The consideration provided by the offeree is insufficient
D) The offer was made in consideration of something illegal

6. **Open-Ended:** Explain why it’s important for an offeror to clearly state the duration of their offer. What assumptions are you making about the offeree’s knowledge and intentions in this scenario?

7. **Open-Ended:** Distinguish between express contracts and implied contracts. Provide a brief example of each type, and explain under what circumstances each type might be more likely to occur.

—

**Answer Key:**

1(A), 2(B), 3(A), 4(C), 5(D)

—
User:

Write a model answer for question 6

Assistant:

**Model Answer – Question 6:**

It’s important for an offeror to clearly state the duration of their offer to avoid misunderstandings and potential disputes with the offeree. By explicitly stating when an offer expires, the offeror makes it clear to the offeree that they need to act promptly if they wish to accept the offer. This promotes fairness and certainty in contract formation.

Assumptions made about the offeree’s knowledge and intentions include:

* The offeree is aware of the time limit placed on the offer.
* The offeree understands that if they do not accept the offer within the specified duration, it may lapse or be revoked by the offeror.
* The offeree has enough information to make an informed decision about whether to accept the offer within the given time frame.
User:

Write a model answer for question 7

Assistant:

**Model Answer – Question 7:**

**Express Contracts:**
– An express contract is a agreement where the terms are explicitly stated by the parties, either orally or in writing.
– Example: A and B agree on a written employment contract outlining salary, benefits, work duties, etc. Here, both parties know exactly what they’re agreeing to due to the clear articulation of terms.
– Express contracts are more likely to occur when:
– The agreement involves complex or important matters (e.g., real estate, business transactions).
– Parties want to ensure clarity and minimize misunderstandings.
– There’s a need for legal enforceability.

**Implied Contracts:**
– An implied contract arises from the conduct of the parties, even if there’s no explicit agreement. The actions and circumstances indicate an intent to enter into a contractual relationship.
– Example: A painter does work on B’s house without a written contract. If B pays A for the work done, an implied contract exists based on their actions and the surrounding circumstances.
– Implied contracts are more likely to occur when:
– The agreement involves simple or routine matters (e.g., everyday transactions).
– Parties act in reliance on each other’s promises or conduct.
– There’s no need for a formal, written agreement.

Some notes:

  • The questions and answers look fine but I’m not a contracts teacher.
  • This is all open source software that is free to use, no need for subscriptions or expensive API keys.
  • It runs on off the shelf hardware. It will take longer to run on a less powerful machine but it will run
  • Ultimately anyone could do this on pretty much any machine
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StarCoder2 – open source code completion models

StarCoder2 is a family of code generation models (3B, 7B, and 15B), trained on 600+ programming languages from The Stack v2 and some natural language text such as Wikipedia, Arxiv, and GitHub issues. The models use Grouped Query Attention, a context window of 16,384 tokens, with sliding window attention of 4,096 tokens. The 3B & 7B models were trained on 3+ trillion tokens, while the 15B was trained on 4+ trillion tokens. For more details check out the paper.

— StarCoder2 @ Github

StarCoder2 is a family of open LLMs for code and comes in 3 different sizes with 3B, 7B and 15B parameters. The flagship StarCoder2-15B model is trained on over 4 trillion tokens and 600+ programming languages from The Stack v2. All models use Grouped Query Attention, a context window of 16,384 tokens with a sliding window attention of 4,096 tokens, and were trained using the Fill-in-the-Middle objective.

StarCoder2 offers three model sizes: a 3 billion-parameter model trained by ServiceNow, a 7 billion-parameter model trained by Hugging Face, and a 15 billion-parameter model trained by NVIDIA using NVIDIA NeMo on NVIDIA accelerated infrastructure:

— StarCoder2 @ Hugging Face

 

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Notes on better search 8/18/2023

Goal: better, more focused search for www.cali.org.

In general the plan is to scrape the site to a vector database, enable embeddings of the vector db in Llama 2, provide API endpoints to search/find things.

Hints and pointers.

  • Llama2-webui – Run any Llama 2 locally with gradio UI on GPU or CPU from anywhere
  • FastAPI – web framework for building APIs with Python 3.7+ based on standard Python type hints
  • Danswer – Ask Questions in natural language and get Answers backed by private sources. It makes use of
    • PostgreSQL – a powerful, open source object-relational database system
    • QDrant – Vector Database for the next generation of AI applications.
    • Typesense – a modern, privacy-friendly, open source search engine built from the ground up using cutting-edge search algorithms, that take advantage of the latest advances in hardware capabilities.

The challenge is to wire together these technologies and then figure out how to get it to play nice with Drupal. One possibility is just to build this with an API and then use the API to interact with Drupal. That approach also offers the possibility of allowing the membership to interact with the API too.

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Github :: free-response-scoring by David Colarusso

This repository shares code used to implement the methods described in Unsupervised Machine Scoring of Free Response Answers—Validated Against Law School Final Exams, presented at the Computational Legal Studies Conference, March 2022, hosted by the Center for Computational Law at Singapore Management University.

You can find links to all relevant content either in, or linked to from, the notebook titled Score Exams.

—/free-response-scoring

Good alternative to LLM text comparison. Note: patent pending Suffolk University

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Customizing GPT-3 for Your Application :: OpenAI

Developers can now fine-tune GPT-3 on their own data, creating a custom version tailored to their application. Customizing makes GPT-3 reliable for a wider variety of use cases and makes running the model cheaper and faster.

You can use an existing dataset of virtually any shape and size, or incrementally add data based on user feedback. With fine-tuning, one API customer was able to increase correct outputs from 83% to 95%. By adding new data from their product each week, another reduced error rates by 50%.

Source: Customizing GPT-3 for Your Application

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Adding Symphora, my WordPress blog, to the #fediverse via ActivityPub (Take 2)

Second try. Probably need to be subscribed first, then post.

Why just join a Mastodon instance if I can turn my entire blog in to a node in the federated social network space? This is the first post that attempts this feat. If it works I’ll write up what I did to make it work. In the meantime you can follow these antics and more by following elmer@www.symphora.com and @emasters@law.builders.

See you on the other side!

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Adding Symphora, my WordPress blog, to the #fediverse via ActivityPub

Why just join a Mastodon instance if I can turn my entire blog in to a node in the federated social network space? This is the first post that attempts this feat. If it works I’ll write up what I did to make it work. In the meantime you can follow these antics and more by following elmer@www.symphora.com and @emasters@law.builders.

See you on the other side!

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The prompt says “Start writing” so, sure, I’ll just start writing. I’m on my phone at the moment so writing is me like swiping but it does have a certain cursive feel to it once you get going. Of course proof reading to avoid bad autocorrect is essential. It also helps to have something to say and that’s a bit subjective I think.

What I’m really looking for is whether or not I can post without a title. Sometimes I have an idea but get stuck staring at the “Add title” and lose my inspiration. Not having to think of a title is nice.

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Scraping the Teknoids Mailman PiperMail Archive

Putting this here in case anyone finds themselves in need of something to scrape a Pipermail web archive of a Mailman mailing list. This bit of Python 3 is based on a a bit of Python 2 I found at Scraping GNU Mailman Pipermail Email List Archives. The only changes I made from the original are to update somethings to work in Python 3. It works well for my purposes, generating a single text file of the teknoids list archive from 2005 to today.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import requests
from lxml import html
import gzip
from io import BytesIO

listname = 'teknoids'
url = 'https://lists.teknoids.net/pipermail/' + listname + '/'

response = requests.get(url)
tree = html.fromstring(response.text)

filenames = tree.xpath('//table/tr/td[3]/a/@href')

def emails_from_filename(filename):
print (filename)
response = requests.get(url + filename)
if filename[-3:] == '.gz':
contents = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=BytesIO(response.content)).read()
else:
contents = response.content
return contents

contents = [emails_from_filename(filename) for filename in filenames]
contents.reverse()

contents = b"\n\n\n\n".join(contents)

with open(listname + '.txt', 'wb') as filehandle:
filehandle.write(contents)

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My last post to teknoids: He’s dead, Jim. This list is getting a reboot

I just posted to the teknoids list letting everyone know I’m shutting down the list and replacing it with a Discourse forum at https://discourse.teknoids.net/. here’s the text of the post:

As a few of you may have noticed things have been amiss with the list since late last year when Microsoft decided to put the list on some sort of irrevocable ban list. As a result messages are not being delivered to over half of the subscribers at law schools around the country. That’s nearly 300 people. More troubling to me is that virtually no one who stopped receiving messages even appears to have noticed that they aren’t getting messages anymore.

After trying many, many approaches to getting the ban lifted and staring at the apparent ambivalence of the list itself I’ve decided to shut down the list effective immediately. The mailing list has been around for 30 years and I’ve been the admin for many of those, so it wasn’t an easy decision to make. The list will no longer function after 5:00 PM ET today, Monday April 4, 2022.

Of course on the Internet nothing ever really goes away. The list archives will continue to be available. For those of you interested in continuing the conversation, growing the community, or just generally keeping in touch I’m launching a new website called The Teknoids List at https://discourse.teknoids.net/. The new Teknoids List is a Discourse-based discussion forum that is up and running now. I’d like to invite everyone on the list to head on over and create an account. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your colleagues! With some luck I hope we can grow the new site into the go to place to discuss and discover that latest in tech + legal education.

If you have any questions or concerns please reply to me directly or, better, head on over to https://discourse.teknoids.net/ and we’ll talk them through.

Thanks,
Elmer
Chief Teknoid
https://discourse.teknoids.net/