DELTA: Pre-train a Discriminative Encoder for Legal Case Retrieval via Structural Word Alignment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Haitao, Ai, Qingyao, Han, Xinyan, Chen, Jia, Dong, Qian, Liu, Yiqun, Chen, Chong, Tian, Qi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Li, Haitao
Ai, Qingyao
Han, Xinyan
Chen, Jia
Dong, Qian
Liu, Yiqun
Chen, Chong
Tian, Qi
author_facet Li, Haitao
Ai, Qingyao
Han, Xinyan
Chen, Jia
Dong, Qian
Liu, Yiqun
Chen, Chong
Tian, Qi
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_18435
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DELTA: Pre-train a Discriminative Encoder for Legal Case Retrieval via Structural Word Alignment
Li, Haitao
Ai, Qingyao
Han, Xinyan
Chen, Jia
Dong, Qian
Liu, Yiqun
Chen, Chong
Tian, Qi
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
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.
title DELTA: Pre-train a Discriminative Encoder for Legal Case Retrieval via Structural Word Alignment
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.18435