Gradle DSL method not found: 'exclude()'

I am working in Android Studio and when I added the line in build.gradle file

dependencies {
    compile files('libs/poi-ooxml-schemas-3.12-20150511-a.jar'){
        exclude group: 'stax', module: 'stax-api'
    }
}

I caught the error:

Gradle DSL method not found: 'exclude()'

What is the reason of the error?