Luis Brena

Summary

I am a Research Assistant in Dr. Van Durme’s lab at Johns Hopkins University, where I work on NLP, argument mining, and legal reasoning. I earned my M.S. in Engineering Management from Johns Hopkins in 2025, under the guidance of Dr. Mahyar Fazlyab. Before this, I led teams in hospitality, retail, software, and sports.

My research focuses on interpretable, safe, and reliable language models for legal analysis. I use declarative language models, case grammar, and LLMs to produce evidence-grounded outputs with calibrated uncertainty. I aim to support legal reasoning by surfacing relevant facts, constructing and critiquing arguments, and aiding high-stakes decisions. My current work examines how models can make evidence evaluation more transparent and capture the different ways humans weigh legal factors.

Applied ML/NLP
Argument mining
IR/RAG
Legal reasoning

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Research

Chain-of-Syllogisms: Unifying Analysis & Conclusions Boosts Argument Mining — Paper · Paper
Mining Legal Arguments in U.S. Corporate Law — Submitted to ARR · Code · Paper
AAO non-precedent dataset + meta-interpreter for decision inference — Ongoing · Code · Presentation

Education

M.S., Engineering Management (Smart Devices/ECE Track) — Johns Hopkins University (2025)
B.Eng., Industrial Engineering — Universidad de Lima (2018)
Graduate Program, Corporate Law — ESAN Business School (2017)