Incorporating Precedents for Legal Judgement Prediction on European Court of Human Rights Cases

Santosh T.y.s.s, Mohamed Elganayni, Stanisław Sójka, Matthias Grabmair


Abstract
Inspired by the legal doctrine of stare decisis, which leverages precedents (prior cases) for informed decision-making, we explore methods to integrate them into LJP models. To facilitate precedent retrieval, we train a retriever with a fine-grained relevance signal based on the overlap ratio of alleged articles between cases. We investigate two strategies to integrate precedents: direct incorporation at inference via label interpolation based on case proximity and during training via a precedent fusion module using a stacked-cross attention model. We employ joint training of the retriever and LJP models to address latent space divergence between them. Our experiments on LJP tasks from the ECHR jurisdiction reveal that integrating precedents during training coupled with joint training of the retriever and LJP model, outperforms models without precedents or with precedents incorporated only at inference, particularly benefiting sparser articles.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.214
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3743–3750
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.214
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Santosh T.y.s.s, Mohamed Elganayni, Stanisław Sójka, and Matthias Grabmair. 2024. Incorporating Precedents for Legal Judgement Prediction on European Court of Human Rights Cases. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 3743–3750, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Incorporating Precedents for Legal Judgement Prediction on European Court of Human Rights Cases (T.y.s.s et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.214.pdf