Legal Charge Prediction via Bilinear Attention Network

Yuquan Le, Yuming Zhao, Meng Chen, Zhe Quan, Xiaodong He, Kenli Li

Abstract: The legal charge prediction task aims to judge appropriate charges according to the given fact description in cases. Most existing methods formulate it as a multi-class text classification problem and have achieved tremendous progress. However, the performance on low-frequency charges is still unsatisfactory. Previous studies indicate leveraging the charge label information can facilitate this task, but the approaches to utilizing the label information are not fully explored. In this paper, inspired by the vision-language information fusion techniques in the multi-modal field, we propose a novel model (denoted as LeapBank) by fusing the representations of text and labels to enhance the legal charge prediction task. Specifically, we devise a representation fusion block based on the bilinear attention network to interact the labels and text tokens seamlessly. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world datasets to compare our proposed method with state-of-the-art models. Experimental results show that LeapBank obtains up to 8.5% Macro-F1 improvements on the low-frequency charges, demonstrating our model's superiority and competitiveness.