Wei Dai


2019

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Charge-Based Prison Term Prediction with Deep Gating Network
Huajie Chen | Deng Cai | Wei Dai | Zehui Dai | Yadong Ding
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Judgment prediction for legal cases has attracted much research efforts for its practice use, of which the ultimate goal is prison term prediction. While existing work merely predicts the total prison term, in reality a defendant is often charged with multiple crimes. In this paper, we argue that charge-based prison term prediction (CPTP) not only better fits realistic needs, but also makes the total prison term prediction more accurate and interpretable. We collect the first large-scale structured data for CPTP and evaluate several competitive baselines. Based on the observation that fine-grained feature selection is the key to achieving good performance, we propose the Deep Gating Network (DGN) for charge-specific feature selection and aggregation. Experiments show that DGN achieves the state-of-the-art performance.