DeBERTa-v3 fine-tuned for hypothesis-level classification of intellectual property rights (IPR) barriers described in the United States Trade Representative's annual National Trade Estimate (NTE) reports. The model emits a continuous hypothesis-alignment score on a roughly -5 to +5 scale. Lower (more negative) values indicate stronger IPR-barrier rhetoric directed at the target country. Higher (more positive) values indicate paragraphs that do not contain barrier criticism.

Model description

The classifier follows the natural-language-inference (NLI) framework for hypothesis-based supervised text scoring described in Grimmer, Roberts, and Stewart (2022, Text as Data, Princeton University Press). Each input paragraph is paired with each of 13 hand-crafted hypotheses about IPR barriers, and the softmax probability of entailment for each pair is multiplied by a fixed hypothesis weight. Weighted entailment probabilities are summed to produce a raw score, which is then min-max rescaled to roughly the -5 to +5 range using the bounds of the published 1,432-paragraph corpus.

The full inference pipeline (premise template, 13 hypotheses, weights, aggregation, and rescaling formula) is documented below in the "Inference pipeline" section.

Hypothesis structure

Six factual hypotheses (H1 through H4, H12, H13) about objective IPR designations and event mentions.
Seven interpretive hypotheses (H5 through H11) capturing the author's stance on the country's IPR efforts.

Intended use

The model is intended for paragraph-level hypothesis scoring of IPR barrier text from USTR NTE reports. Typical applications include country-year IPR severity measurement and longitudinal analysis of US trade rhetoric.

The companion R package nteText (https://github.com/jacqpark/nteText) ships pre-computed scores and a wrapper around this model.

remotes::install_github("jacqpark/nteText")
nteText::nte_score_ipr(
  text    = c("Patent enforcement remains weak across multiple sectors.",
              "The country has fully implemented its TRIPS obligations."),
  country = c("INDIA", "SINGAPORE"),
  year    = c(2020L, 2020L)
)

Direct use from Python (with the helper from inst/python/score_ipr.py on the path).

python

import score_ipr
scores = score_ipr.score(
    text=["Patent enforcement remains weak across multiple sectors."],
    country=["INDIA"],
    year=[2020],
    model_id="jacqpark/nte-deberta-ipr",
)

Limitations

The model targets IPR text only. It was trained on hypothesis labels specific to intellectual property rights barriers as articulated in NTE reports. Applying it to text outside this domain (other NTE issue areas, non-USTR documents, non-trade-policy prose) will produce out-of-distribution scores with no error or warning.

The training corpus reflects the rhetorical conventions of USTR. Use with comparable text from other governments or international organizations may underperform.

Training data

Hand-labeled training set of 300 IPR paragraphs from NTE reports spanning 1995 through 2022, drawn from 49 countries. Each paragraph was scored by the author on a -4 to +4 integer scale on each of 13 hypotheses, yielding up to 3,900 NLI pairs.

Training procedure

Base checkpoint is MoritzLaurer/DeBERTa-v3-large-mnli-fever-anli-ling-wanli, an NLI model already fine-tuned on MNLI, FEVER-NLI, ANLI, LingNLI, and WANLI. Training uses hypothesis-paragraph NLI pairs under 10-fold cross-validation (roughly 1,598 pairs per fold on average, range 1,578 to 1,629). All metrics reported below are fully out-of-sample. See NTE_DeBERTa_V3_revised_colab.ipynb in the source repository for exact hyperparameters.

Inference pipeline

The steps below match the published scoring pipeline exactly. A reference Python implementation lives at inst/python/score_ipr.py.

Premise template

For each paragraph, the premise fed to the model is

This text is about the IPR protection situation in country {COUNTRY} and year {YEAR}: {TEXT}

where {COUNTRY} is the uppercased country name, {YEAR} is the report year, and {TEXT} is the paragraph text.

Hypotheses and weights

The 13 hypotheses and their fixed score weights.

ID	Type	Hypothesis	Weight
H1	factual	The country is the Priority Foreign Country.	-2.0
H2	factual	The country is on the Priority Watch List.	-2.0
H3	factual	The country is on the Watch List.	-1.5
H4	factual	The country has markets listed as the Notorious Market.	-1.5
H5	interpretive	The author of this text believes that the country does not put in efforts to combat IPR violations.	-1.0
H6	interpretive	The author of this text believes that the country has made efforts to combat IPR violations.	+1.0
H7	interpretive	The author of this text supports the passage of the new IPR legislation in the country.	+1.0
H8	interpretive	The author of this text opposes the passage of the new IPR legislation in the country.	-1.0
H9	interpretive	The author of this text believes that there is widespread IPR violation in the country.	-1.5
H10	interpretive	The author of this text believes that the country is lack of resources to combat IPR violations.	-1.0
H11	interpretive	The author of this text believes that the country has strong IPR law.	+2.0
H12	factual	This text mentions the increase of IPR violations in the country.	-1.0
H13	factual	This text mentions the decrease of IPR violations in the country.	+1.0

Aggregation

For each (premise, hypothesis) pair, take the softmax over the three-class NLI head (entailment, neutral, contradiction) and read the entailment probability at index 0 (the convention used in the MoritzLaurer NLI checkpoint family). Sum across the 13 hypotheses, weighted.

raw_score = sum(P_entail(premise, h_i) * weight_i for i in 1..13)

Rescaling

Min-max rescale the raw score to roughly the -5 to +5 range using the bounds from the published corpus run.

PUBLISHED_RAW_MIN = -8.7824
PUBLISHED_RAW_MAX =  4.5083

scaled = -5 + 10 * (raw - PUBLISHED_RAW_MIN) / (PUBLISHED_RAW_MAX - PUBLISHED_RAW_MIN)

New paragraphs more extreme than anything in the published corpus may produce scaled scores outside the -5 to +5 envelope. That is expected behavior.

Evaluation

10-fold cross-validation (Grimmer, Roberts, and Stewart 2022)

Aggregate score validation.

Weighted F1   0.787
Accuracy      0.773
Pearson r     0.676
Spearman rho  0.689

Per-class metrics (binarized at midpoint of bin means).

Class	Precision	Recall	F1	N
Negative	0.938	0.746	0.831	224
Positive	0.533	0.855	0.657	76

Hypothesis-level pool across H1 through H13.

Weighted F1   0.870
Accuracy      0.863

Per-hypothesis validation

Out-of-sample weighted F1 and accuracy by hypothesis (10-fold CV). N=1 is the count of paragraphs hand-coded as entailing the hypothesis. N=0 is the count of paragraphs hand-coded as not entailing it.

Hypothesis	Type	wF1	Acc	N=1	N=0
H1	factual	0.988	0.987	6	294
H2	factual	0.977	0.977	58	242
H3	factual	0.963	0.963	86	214
H4	factual	0.993	0.993	21	279
H5	interpretive	0.840	0.840	146	154
H6	interpretive	0.694	0.697	110	190
H7	interpretive	0.813	0.777	32	268
H8	interpretive	0.849	0.797	15	285
H9	interpretive	0.803	0.803	134	166
H10	interpretive	0.875	0.847	21	279
H11	interpretive	0.857	0.840	35	265
H12	factual	0.893	0.840	7	293
H13	factual	0.894	0.857	11	289
Pool		0.870	0.863

Citation

To cite the model and companion package directly.

bibtex

@software{park_nteText_2026,
  author    = {Park, Jihye},
  title     = {nteText: USTR National Trade Estimate Corpus and IPR Hypothesis Scores},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  version   = {v0.1.0},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.20028790},
  url       = {https://github.com/jacqpark/nteText}
}

To cite the working paper that introduces the measure.

bibtex

@unpublished{park_nteipr,
  author = {Park, Jihye},
  title  = {Aid, Lending, and TRIPS},
  note   = {Working paper, University of Geneva},
  year   = {2026}
}

License

MIT.

Contact

Jihye Park, University of Geneva. jihye.park.psci@gmail.com.