Few-Shot Charge Prediction with Discriminative Legal Attributes

Zikun Hu, Xiang Li, Cunchao Tu, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun


Abstract
Automatic charge prediction aims to predict the final charges according to the fact descriptions in criminal cases and plays a crucial role in legal assistant systems. Existing works on charge prediction perform adequately on those high-frequency charges but are not yet capable of predicting few-shot charges with limited cases. Moreover, these exist many confusing charge pairs, whose fact descriptions are fairly similar to each other. To address these issues, we introduce several discriminative attributes of charges as the internal mapping between fact descriptions and charges. These attributes provide additional information for few-shot charges, as well as effective signals for distinguishing confusing charges. More specifically, we propose an attribute-attentive charge prediction model to infer the attributes and charges simultaneously. Experimental results on real-work datasets demonstrate that our proposed model achieves significant and consistent improvements than other state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, our model outperforms other baselines by more than 50% in the few-shot scenario. Our codes and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/attribute_charge.
Anthology ID:
C18-1041
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
487–498
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1041
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zikun Hu, Xiang Li, Cunchao Tu, Zhiyuan Liu, and Maosong Sun. 2018. Few-Shot Charge Prediction with Discriminative Legal Attributes. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 487–498, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Few-Shot Charge Prediction with Discriminative Legal Attributes (Hu et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1041.pdf
Code
 thunlp/attribute_charge