In this paper, we give an overview of the Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) competition at Chinese AI and Law challenge (CAIL2018). This competition focuses on LJP which aims to predict the judgment results according to the given facts. Specifically, in CAIL2018 , we proposed three subtasks of LJP for the contestants, i.e., predicting relevant law articles, charges and prison terms given the fact descriptions. CAIL2018 has attracted several hundreds participants (601 teams, 1, 144 contestants from 269 organizations). In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of the task definition, related works, outstanding methods and competition results in CAIL2018.
With the development of machine learning techniques, more works propose to employ existing machine learning models to improve the performance on LJP. In these works, they usually formalize LJP as a text classification problem and focus on extracting efficient shallow features from the given facts and additional resources @cite_11 @cite_13 @cite_2 @cite_0 . These works integrate machine learning methods into LJP tasks and achieve a promising performance of LJP. However, these conventional methods can only extract well-defined shallow textual features from the fact descriptions.
@cite_2 @cite_0 @cite_13 @cite_11
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Recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning provide us with the tools to build predictive models that can be used to unveil patterns driving judicial decisions. This can be useful, for both lawyers and judges, as an assisting tool to rapidly identify cases and extract patterns which lead to certain decisions. This paper presents the first systematic study on predicting the outcome of cases tried by the European Court of Human Rights based solely on textual content. We formulate a binary classification task where the input of our classifiers is the textual content extracted from a case and the target output is the actual judgment as to whether there has been a violation of an article of the convention of human rights. Textual information is represented using contiguous word sequences, i.e., N-grams, and topics. Our models can predict the court’s decisions with a strong accuracy (79 on average). Our empirical analysis indicates that the formal facts of a case are the most important predictive factor. This is consistent with the theory of legal realism suggesting that judicial decision-making is significantly affected by the stimulus of the facts. We also observe that the topical content of a case is another important feature in this classification task and explore this relationship further by conducting a qualitative analysis. With the increasing availability of electronic documents and the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, the task of automatic categorization of documents became the key method for organizing the information and know- ledge discovery. Proper classification of e-documents, online news, blogs, e-mails and digital libraries need text mining, machine learning and natural language processing tech- niques to get meaningful knowledge. The aim of this paper is to highlight the important techniques and methodologies that are employed in text documents classification, while at the same time making awareness of some of the interesting challenges that remain to be solved, focused mainly on text representation and machine learning techniques. This paper provides a review of the theory and methods of document classification and text mining, focusing on the existing litera- ture. The charge prediction task is to determine appropriate charges for a given case, which is helpful for legal assistant systems where the user input is fact description. We argue that relevant law articles play an important role in this task, and therefore propose an attention-based neural network method to jointly model the charge prediction task and the relevant article extraction task in a unified framework. The experimental results show that, besides providing legal basis, the relevant articles can also clearly improve the charge prediction results, and our full model can effectively predict appropriate charges for cases with different expression styles.