Abstract
Legal judgment prediction is the task of automatically predicting the outcome of a court case, given a text describing the case’s facts. Previous work on using neural models for this task has focused on Chinese; only feature-based models (e.g., using bags of words and topics) have been considered in English. We release a new English legal judgment prediction dataset, containing cases from the European Court of Human Rights. We evaluate a broad variety of neural models on the new dataset, establishing strong baselines that surpass previous feature-based models in three tasks: (1) binary violation classification; (2) multi-label classification; (3) case importance prediction. We also explore if models are biased towards demographic information via data anonymization. As a side-product, we propose a hierarchical version of BERT, which bypasses BERT’s length limitation.- Anthology ID:
- P19-1424
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Florence, Italy
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 4317–4323
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/P19-1424
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/P19-1424
- Cite (ACL):
- Ilias Chalkidis, Ion Androutsopoulos, and Nikolaos Aletras. 2019. Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4317–4323, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English (Chalkidis et al., ACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/P19-1424.pdf
- Data
- ECHR