Automatic Charge Identification from Facts: A Few Sentence-Level Charge Annotations is All You Need

Shounak Paul, Pawan Goyal, Saptarshi Ghosh

Abstract
Automatic Charge Identification (ACI) is the task of identifying the relevant charges given the facts of a situation and the statutory laws that define these charges, and is a crucial aspect of the judicial process. Existing works focus on learning charge-side representations by modeling relationships between the charges, but not much effort has been made in improving fact-side representations. We observe that only a small fraction of sentences in the facts actually indicates the charges. We show that by using a very small subset (< 3%) of fact descriptions annotated with sentence-level charges, we can achieve an improvement across a range of different ACI models, as compared to modeling just the main document-level task on a much larger dataset. Additionally, we propose a novel model that utilizes sentence-level charge labels as an auxiliary task, coupled with the main task of document-level charge identification in a multi-task learning framework. The proposed model comprehensively outperforms a large number of recent baselines for ACI. The improvement in performance is particularly noticeable for the rare charges which are known to be especially challenging to identify.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.88
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1011–1022
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.88
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.88
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shounak Paul, Pawan Goyal, and Saptarshi Ghosh. 2020. Automatic Charge Identification from Facts: A Few Sentence-Level Charge Annotations is All You Need. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1011–1022, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Charge Identification from Facts: A Few Sentence-Level Charge Annotations is All You Need (Paul et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2020.coling-main.88.pdf
Code
 law-ai/automatic-charge-identification
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