AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation

Zhitao He, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao


Abstract
With the development of deep learning, natural language processing technology has effectively improved the efficiency of various aspects of the traditional judicial industry. However, most current efforts focus on tasks within individual judicial stages, making it difficult to handle complex tasks that span multiple stages. As the autonomous agents powered by large language models are becoming increasingly smart and able to make complex decisions in real-world settings, offering new insights for judicial intelligence. In this paper, (1) we propose a novel multi-agent framework, AgentsCourt, for judicial decision-making. Our framework follows the classic court trial process, consisting of court debate simulation, legal resources retrieval and decision-making refinement to simulate the decision-making of judge. (2) we introduce SimuCourt, a judicial benchmark that encompasses 420 Chinese judgment documents, spanning the three most common types of judicial cases. Furthermore, to support this task, we construct a large-scale legal knowledge base, Legal-KB, with multi-resource legal knowledge. (3) Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms the existing advanced methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles, where our model achieves significant improvements of 8.6% and 9.1% F1 score in the first and second instance settings, respectively.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.549
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9399–9416
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-emnlp.549/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.549
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhitao He, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Kang Liu, and Jun Zhao. 2024. AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 9399–9416, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation (He et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2024.findings-emnlp.549.pdf