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)
- Editors:
- Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
- 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
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2020.coling-main.88.pdf
- Code
- law-ai/automatic-charge-identification