ILDC for CJPE: Indian Legal Documents Corpus for Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation

Vijit Malik, Rishabh Sanjay, Shubham Kumar Nigam, Kripabandhu Ghosh, Shouvik Kumar Guha, Arnab Bhattacharya, Ashutosh Modi


Abstract
An automated system that could assist a judge in predicting the outcome of a case would help expedite the judicial process. For such a system to be practically useful, predictions by the system should be explainable. To promote research in developing such a system, we introduce ILDC (Indian Legal Documents Corpus). ILDC is a large corpus of 35k Indian Supreme Court cases annotated with original court decisions. A portion of the corpus (a separate test set) is annotated with gold standard explanations by legal experts. Based on ILDC, we propose the task of Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation (CJPE). The task requires an automated system to predict an explainable outcome of a case. We experiment with a battery of baseline models for case predictions and propose a hierarchical occlusion based model for explainability. Our best prediction model has an accuracy of 78% versus 94% for human legal experts, pointing towards the complexity of the prediction task. The analysis of explanations by the proposed algorithm reveals a significant difference in the point of view of the algorithm and legal experts for explaining the judgments, pointing towards scope for future research.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.313
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4046–4062
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.313
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.313
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vijit Malik, Rishabh Sanjay, Shubham Kumar Nigam, Kripabandhu Ghosh, Shouvik Kumar Guha, Arnab Bhattacharya, and Ashutosh Modi. 2021. ILDC for CJPE: Indian Legal Documents Corpus for Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4046–4062, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ILDC for CJPE: Indian Legal Documents Corpus for Court Judgment Prediction and Explanation (Malik et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.acl-long.313.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.acl-long.313.mp4
Code
 Exploration-Lab/CJPE
Data
ILDC