Caseformer: Pre-training for Legal Case Retrieval Based on Inter-Case Distinctions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Su, Weihang, Ai, Qingyao, Wu, Yueyue, Ma, Yixiao, Li, Haitao, Liu, Yiqun, Wu, Zhijing, Zhang, Min
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Su, Weihang
Ai, Qingyao
Wu, Yueyue
Ma, Yixiao
Li, Haitao
Liu, Yiqun
Wu, Zhijing
Zhang, Min
author_facet Su, Weihang
Ai, Qingyao
Wu, Yueyue
Ma, Yixiao
Li, Haitao
Liu, Yiqun
Wu, Zhijing
Zhang, Min
contents Legal case retrieval aims to help legal workers find relevant cases related to their cases at hand, which is important for the guarantee of fairness and justice in legal judgments. While recent advances in neural retrieval methods have significantly improved the performance of open-domain retrieval tasks (e.g., Web search), their advantages have not been observed in legal case retrieval due to their thirst for annotated data. As annotating large-scale training data in legal domains is prohibitive due to the need for domain expertise, traditional search techniques based on lexical matching such as TF-IDF, BM25, and Query Likelihood are still prevalent in legal case retrieval systems. While previous studies have designed several pre-training methods for IR models in open-domain tasks, these methods are usually suboptimal in legal case retrieval because they cannot understand and capture the key knowledge and data structures in the legal corpus. To this end, we propose a novel pre-training framework named Caseformer that enables the pre-trained models to learn legal knowledge and domain-specific relevance information in legal case retrieval without any human-labeled data. Through three unsupervised learning tasks, Caseformer is able to capture the special language, document structure, and relevance patterns of legal case documents, making it a strong backbone for downstream legal case retrieval tasks. Experimental results show that our model has achieved state-of-the-art performance in both zero-shot and full-data fine-tuning settings. Also, experiments on both Chinese and English legal datasets demonstrate that the effectiveness of Caseformer is language-independent in legal case retrieval.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_00333
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Caseformer: Pre-training for Legal Case Retrieval Based on Inter-Case Distinctions
Su, Weihang
Ai, Qingyao
Wu, Yueyue
Ma, Yixiao
Li, Haitao
Liu, Yiqun
Wu, Zhijing
Zhang, Min
Information Retrieval
Legal case retrieval aims to help legal workers find relevant cases related to their cases at hand, which is important for the guarantee of fairness and justice in legal judgments. While recent advances in neural retrieval methods have significantly improved the performance of open-domain retrieval tasks (e.g., Web search), their advantages have not been observed in legal case retrieval due to their thirst for annotated data. As annotating large-scale training data in legal domains is prohibitive due to the need for domain expertise, traditional search techniques based on lexical matching such as TF-IDF, BM25, and Query Likelihood are still prevalent in legal case retrieval systems. While previous studies have designed several pre-training methods for IR models in open-domain tasks, these methods are usually suboptimal in legal case retrieval because they cannot understand and capture the key knowledge and data structures in the legal corpus. To this end, we propose a novel pre-training framework named Caseformer that enables the pre-trained models to learn legal knowledge and domain-specific relevance information in legal case retrieval without any human-labeled data. Through three unsupervised learning tasks, Caseformer is able to capture the special language, document structure, and relevance patterns of legal case documents, making it a strong backbone for downstream legal case retrieval tasks. Experimental results show that our model has achieved state-of-the-art performance in both zero-shot and full-data fine-tuning settings. Also, experiments on both Chinese and English legal datasets demonstrate that the effectiveness of Caseformer is language-independent in legal case retrieval.
title Caseformer: Pre-training for Legal Case Retrieval Based on Inter-Case Distinctions
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00333