LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset

Feng Yao, Chaojun Xiao, Xiaozhi Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Cunchao Tu, Juanzi Li, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen, Maosong Sun


Abstract
Recognizing facts is the most fundamental step in making judgments, hence detecting events in the legal documents is important to legal case analysis tasks. However, existing Legal Event Detection (LED) datasets only concern incomprehensive event types and have limited annotated data, which restricts the development of LED methods and their downstream applications. To alleviate these issues, we present LEVEN a large-scale Chinese LEgal eVENt detection dataset, with 8,116 legal documents and 150,977 human-annotated event mentions in 108 event types. Not only charge-related events, LEVEN also covers general events, which are critical for legal case understanding but neglected in existing LED datasets. To our knowledge, LEVEN is the largest LED dataset and has dozens of times the data scale of others, which shall significantly promote the training and evaluation of LED methods. The results of extensive experiments indicate that LED is challenging and needs further effort. Moreover, we simply utilize legal events as side information to promote downstream applications. The method achieves improvements of average 2.2 points precision in low-resource judgment prediction, and 1.5 points mean average precision in unsupervised case retrieval, which suggests the fundamentality of LED. The source code and dataset can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/LEVEN.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-acl.17
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
183–201
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.17
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.17
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Feng Yao, Chaojun Xiao, Xiaozhi Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Lei Hou, Cunchao Tu, Juanzi Li, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen, and Maosong Sun. 2022. LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022, pages 183–201, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset (Yao et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-acl.17.pdf
Software:
 2022.findings-acl.17.software.zip
Code
 thunlp/leven
Data
LEVEN