De-Biased Court’s View Generation with Causality

Yiquan Wu, Kun Kuang, Yating Zhang, Xiaozhong Liu, Changlong Sun, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Luo Si, Fei Wu


Abstract
Court’s view generation is a novel but essential task for legal AI, aiming at improving the interpretability of judgment prediction results and enabling automatic legal document generation. While prior text-to-text natural language generation (NLG) approaches can be used to address this problem, neglecting the confounding bias from the data generation mechanism can limit the model performance, and the bias may pollute the learning outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Attentional and Counterfactual based Natural Language Generation (AC-NLG) method, consisting of an attentional encoder and a pair of innovative counterfactual decoders. The attentional encoder leverages the plaintiff’s claim and fact description as input to learn a claim-aware encoder from which the claim-related information in fact description can be emphasized. The counterfactual decoders are employed to eliminate the confounding bias in data and generate judgment-discriminative court’s views (both supportive and non-supportive views) by incorporating with a synergistic judgment predictive model. Comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method under both quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.56
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
763–780
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.56
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.56
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiquan Wu, Kun Kuang, Yating Zhang, Xiaozhong Liu, Changlong Sun, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Luo Si, and Fei Wu. 2020. De-Biased Court’s View Generation with Causality. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 763–780, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
De-Biased Court’s View Generation with Causality (Wu et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.56.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2020.emnlp-main.56.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
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