Papers › Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English

Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English

5 Jun 2019ACL 2019 7arXiv:1906.02059archive 2025-07-28

Ilias Chalkidis, Ion Androutsopoulos, Nikolaos Aletras

Legal judgment prediction is the task of automatically predicting the outcome of a court case, given a text describing the case's facts. Previous work on using neural models for this task has focused on Chinese; only feature-based models (e.g., using bags of words and topics) have been considered in English. We release a new English legal judgment prediction dataset, containing cases from the European Court of Human Rights. We evaluate a broad variety of neural models on the new dataset, establishing strong baselines that surpass previous feature-based models in three tasks: (1) binary violation classification; (2) multi-label classification; (3) case importance prediction. We also explore if models are biased towards demographic information via data anonymization. As a side-product, we propose a hierarchical version of BERT, which bypasses BERT's length limitation.

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Tasks

Binary text classificationGeneral ClassificationMUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATIONMulti-Label ClassificationPrediction

Datasets

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ECHR

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Binary text classification ECHR Non-Anonymized HIER-BERT Macro F1 82.0 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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