With the development of deep learning, natural language processing technology has effectively improved the efficiency of various aspects of the traditional judicial industry. However, most current efforts focus on tasks within individual judicial stages, making it difficult to handle complex tasks that span multiple stages. As the autonomous agents powered by large language models are becoming increasingly smart and able to make complex decisions in real-world settings, offering new insights for judicial intelligence. In this paper, (1) we propose a novel multi-agent framework, AgentsCourt, for judicial decision-making. Our framework follows the classic court trial process, consisting of court debate simulation, legal resources retrieval and decision-making refinement to simulate the decision-making of judge. (2) we introduce SimuCourt, a judicial benchmark that encompasses 420 Chinese judgment documents, spanning the three most common types of judicial cases. Furthermore, to support this task, we construct a large-scale legal knowledge base, Legal-KB, with multi-resource legal knowledge. (3) Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms the existing advanced methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles, where our model achieves significant improvements of 8.6% and 9.1% F1 score in the first and second instance settings, respectively.

Event Causality Identification (ECI) refers to the detection of causal relations between events in texts. However, most existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving more challenging document-level ECI (DECI) with low-resource languages under-explored. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning (GIMC) for zero-shot cross-lingual document-level ECI. Specifically, we introduce a heterogeneous graph interaction network to model the long-distance dependencies between events that are scattered over a document. Then, to improve cross-lingual transferability of causal knowledge learned from the source language, we propose a multi-granularity contrastive transfer learning module to align the causal representations across languages. Extensive experiments show our framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score on monolingual and multilingual scenarios respectively. Notably, in the multilingual scenario, our zero-shot framework even exceeds GPT-3.5 with few-shot learning by 24.3% in overall performance.

Causality Explanation Generation refers to generate an explanation in natural language given an initial cause-effect pair. It demands rigorous explicit rationales to demonstrate the acquisition of implicit commonsense knowledge, which is unlikely to be easily memorized, making it challenging for large language models since they are often suffering from spurious causal associations when they encounter the content that does not exist in their memory. In this work, we introduce LEGO, a Multi-agent Collaborative Framework with Role-playing and Iterative Feedback for causality explanation generation. Specifically, we treat LLM as character malleable LEGO block and utilize role-playing to assign specific roles to five LLMs. We firstly devise a Fine-grained World Knowledge Integration Module to augment information about tasks for alleviating the phenomenon of spurious causal associations. Then, we leverage an Iterative Feedback and Refinement Module to improve the generated explanation by multi-aspect feedback. Extensive experiments on widely used WIKIWHY and e-CARE datasets show the superiority of our multi-agent framework in terms of reasoning about the causality among cause and effect.

Despite the significant progress in developing named entity recognition models, scaling to novel-emerging types still remains challenging in real-world scenarios. Continual learning and zero-shot learning approaches have been explored to handle novel-emerging types with less human supervision, but they have not been as successfully adopted as supervised approaches. Meanwhile, humans possess a much larger vocabulary size than these approaches and have the ability to learn the alignment between entities and concepts effortlessly through natural supervision. In this paper, we consider a more realistic and challenging setting called open-vocabulary named entity recognition (OVNER) to imitate human-level ability. OVNER aims to recognize entities in novel types by their textual names or descriptions. Specifically, we formulate OVNER as a semantic matching task and propose a novel and scalable two-stage method called Context-Type SemAntiC Alignment and FusiOn (CACAO). In the pre-training stage, we adopt Dual-Encoder for context-type semantic alignment and pre-train Dual-Encoder on 80M context-type pairs which are easily accessible through natural supervision. In the fine-tuning stage, we use Cross-Encoder for context-type semantic fusion and fine-tune Cross-Encoder on base types with human supervision. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on three challenging OVNER benchmarks by 9.7%, 9.5%, and 1.8% F1-score of novel types. Moreover, CACAO also demonstrates its flexible transfer ability in cross-domain NER.

In this paper, we propose CogKGE, a knowledge graph embedding (KGE) toolkit, which aims to represent multi-source and heterogeneous knowledge. For multi-source knowledge, unlike existing methods that mainly focus on entity-centric knowledge, CogKGE also supports the representations of event-centric, commonsense and linguistic knowledge. For heterogeneous knowledge, besides structured triple facts, CogKGE leverages additional unstructured information, such as text descriptions, node types and temporal information, to enhance the meaning of embeddings. Designing CogKGE aims to provide a unified programming framework for KGE tasks and a series of knowledge representations for downstream tasks. As a research framework, CogKGE consists of five parts, including core, data, model, knowledge and adapter module. As a knowledge discovery toolkit, CogKGE provides pre-trained embedders to discover new facts, cluster entities and check facts. Furthermore, we construct two benchmark datasets for further research on multi-source heterogeneous KGE tasks: EventKG240K and CogNet360K. We also release an online system to discover knowledge visually. Source code, datasets and pre-trained embeddings are publicly available at GitHub, with a short instruction video.