@inproceedings{feng-etal-2026-legal,
    title = "Legal Judgment Prediction: A Reflection on the State of the Art",
    author = "Feng, Yi  and
      Li, Chuanyi  and
      Ng, Vincent",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.2098/",
    pages = "45254--45273",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Automatic legal judgment prediction (LJP) has recently received increasing attention in the natural language processing community because of its practical values in the real world. Significant progress has been achieved on LJP in the past decade. However, most existing LJP research primarily focuses on developing methods that achieve better performance on standard evaluation datasets, with limited emphasis on the long-term advancement of the field beyond improving evaluation metrics. In this position paper, we reflect on the state of the art in LJP research, and explore issues that should motivate researchers to think beyond merely enhancing performance metrics, with the ultimate goal of sparking discussions among LJP researchers about the future trajectory of the field."
}