Papers › Deconfounding Legal Judgment Prediction for European Court of Human Rights Cases...

Deconfounding Legal Judgment Prediction for European Court of Human Rights Cases Towards Better Alignment with Experts

25 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.13836archive 2025-07-28

T. Y. S. S Santosh, Shanshan Xu, Oana Ichim, Matthias Grabmair

This work demonstrates that Legal Judgement Prediction systems without expert-informed adjustments can be vulnerable to shallow, distracting surface signals that arise from corpus construction, case distribution, and confounding factors. To mitigate this, we use domain expertise to strategically identify statistically predictive but legally irrelevant information. We adopt adversarial training to prevent the system from relying on it. We evaluate our deconfounded models by employing interpretability techniques and comparing to expert annotations. Quantitative experiments and qualitative analysis show that our deconfounded model consistently aligns better with expert rationales than baselines trained for prediction only. We further contribute a set of reference expert annotations to the validation and testing partitions of an existing benchmark dataset of European Court of Human Rights cases.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

tumlegaltech/deconfounding_echr_emnlp22 officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections