Creating Auxiliary Representations from Charge Definitions for Criminal Charge Prediction

Understand

Charge prediction, determining charges for criminal cases by analyzing the textual fact descriptions, is a promising technology in legal assistant systems.

• In practice, the fact descriptions could exhibit a significant intra-class variation due to factors like non-normative use of language, which makes the prediction task very challenging, especially for charge classes with too few samples to cover the expression variation.
• In this work, we explore to use the charge definitions from criminal law to alleviate this issue.
• The key idea is that the expressions in a fact description should have corresponding formal terms in charge definitions, and those terms are shared across classes and could account for the diversity in the fact descriptions.