Exploring Semi-supervised Hierarchical Stacked Encoder for Legal Judgement Prediction
This work addresses legal judgment prediction for legal professionals, but it is incremental as it builds on existing transformer-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of predicting legal judgments from unannotated case facts by proposing a semi-supervised hierarchical stacked encoder, achieving higher performance gains than previous methods on the ILDC dataset.
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.