What Makes a Charge? Identifying Charge-Discriminative Facts with Legal Elements

  • Xiyue Luo
  • , Wenhan Chao
  • , Xian Zhou*
  • , Lihong Wang
  • , Zhunchen Luo
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been a significant surge in the use of deep learning models for automated charge identification tasks, yielding impressive results. However, these models still face several limitations when it comes to explaining the rationale behind charge predictions. Recent research has sought to enhance interpretability by extracting discriminative features from factual descriptions. Nevertheless, such studies often neglect a thorough examination of the corresponding legal provisions. To tackle this issue, the objective of this paper is to establish a fine-grained connection between charges and factual components, specifically identifying charge-discriminative facts that encompass essential legal elements. Several challenges need to be addressed, including the presence of noisy sentences, imbalanced data, and the need for distinct legal elements corresponding to different charges. To tackle these challenges, this paper reframes the task as a few-shot text classification problem and introduces a meta-learning framework that integrates legal element information through a prototypical network. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in improving charge prediction accuracy and establishing meaningful associations between charges and factual evidences.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNatural Language Processing and Chinese Computing - 12th National CCF Conference, NLPCC 2023, Proceedings
EditorsFei Liu, Nan Duan, Qingting Xu, Yu Hong
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages298-310
Number of pages13
ISBN (Print)9783031446924
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event12th National CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2023 - Foshan, China
Duration: 12 Oct 202315 Oct 2023

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14302 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference12th National CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2023
Country/TerritoryChina
CityFoshan
Period12/10/2315/10/23

Keywords

  • Charge-discriminative fact identification
  • Few-shot text classification
  • Meta-learning framework

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