DELTA: Pre-train a Discriminative Encoder for Legal Case Retrieval via Structural Word Alignment
Recent research demonstrates the effectiveness of using pre-trained language models for legal case retrieval. Most of the existing works focus on improving the representation ability for the contextualized embedding of the [CLS] token and calculate relevance using textual semantic similarity. However, in the legal domain, textual semantic similarity does not always imply that the cases are relevant enough. Instead, relevance in legal cases primarily depends on the similarity of key facts that impact the final judgment. Without proper treatments, the discriminative ability of learned representations could be limited since legal cases are lengthy and contain numerous non-key facts. To this end, we introduce DELTA, a discriminative model designed for legal case retrieval. The basic idea involves pinpointing key facts in legal cases and pulling the contextualized embedding of the [CLS] token closer to the key facts while pushing away from the non-key facts, which can warm up the case embedding space in an unsupervised manner. To be specific, this study brings the word alignment mechanism to the contextual masked auto-encoder. First, we leverage shallow decoders to create information bottlenecks, aiming to enhance the representation ability. Second, we employ the deep decoder to enable translation between different structures, with the goal of pinpointing key facts to enhance discriminative ability. Comprehensive experiments conducted on publicly available legal benchmarks show that our approach can outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in legal case retrieval. It provides a new perspective on the in-depth understanding and processing of legal case documents.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
RetrievalSemantic SimilaritySemantic Textual SimilarityWord AlignmentMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
SAILER: Structure-aware Pre-trained Language Model for Legal Case Retrieval
Legal case retrieval, which aims to find relevant cases for a query case, plays a core role in the intelligent legal system. Despite the success that pre-training has achieved in ad-hoc retrieval tasks, effective pre-tra…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingRetrievalCaseEncoder: A Knowledge-enhanced Pre-trained Model for Legal Case Encoding
Legal case retrieval is a critical process for modern legal information systems. While recent studies have utilized pre-trained language models (PLMs) based on the general domain self-supervised pre-training paradigm to …
RetrievalExploring Semi-supervised Hierarchical Stacked Encoder for Legal Judgement Prediction
Predicting the judgment of a legal case from its unannotated case facts is a challenging task. The lengthy and non-uniform document structure poses an even greater challenge in extracting information for decision predict…
SentenceSentence EmbeddingsLegal Element-oriented Modeling with Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Legal Case Retrieval
Legal case retrieval, which aims to retrieve relevant cases given a query case, plays an essential role in the legal system. While recent research efforts improve the performance of traditional ad-hoc retrieval models, l…
Contrastive LearningLanguage ModellingRetrievalEnabling Discriminative Reasoning in LLMs for Legal Judgment Prediction
Legal judgment prediction is essential for enhancing judicial efficiency. In this work, we identify that existing large language models (LLMs) underperform in this domain due to challenges in understanding case complexit…
Prediction