Exploring Semi-supervised Hierarchical Stacked Encoder for Legal Judgement Prediction

Predicting the judgment of a legal case from its unannotated case facts is a challenging task. The lengthy and non-uniform document structure poses an even greater challenge in extracting information for decision prediction. In this work, we explore and propose a two-level classification mechanism;...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2023-11
Main Authors: Prasad, Nishchal, Boughanem, Mohand, Taoufiq Dkaki
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Clustering
Coders
Data processing
Documents
Predictions
Transformers
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Predicting the judgment of a legal case from its unannotated case facts is a challenging task. The lengthy and non-uniform document structure poses an even greater challenge in extracting information for decision prediction. In this work, we explore and propose a two-level classification mechanism; both supervised and unsupervised; by using domain-specific pre-trained BERT to extract information from long documents in terms of sentence embeddings further processing with transformer encoder layer and use unsupervised clustering to extract hidden labels from these embeddings to better predict a judgment of a legal case. We conduct several experiments with this mechanism and see higher performance gains than the previously proposed methods on the ILDC dataset. Our experimental results also show the importance of domain-specific pre-training of Transformer Encoders in legal information processing.
ISSN:2331-8422