Multi-task Legal Judgement Prediction Combining a Subtask of the Seriousness of Charges

Legal Judgement Prediction has attracted more and more attention in recent years. One of the challenges is how to design a model with better interpretable prediction results. Previous studies have proposed different interpretable models based on the generation of court views and the extraction of charge keywords. Different from previous work, we propose a multi-task legal judgement prediction model which combines a subtask of the seriousness of charges. By introducing this subtask, our model can capture the attention weights of different terms of penalty corresponding to charges and give more attention to the correct terms of penalty in the fact descriptions. Meanwhile, our model also incorporates the position of defendant making it capable of giving attention to the contextual information of the defendant. We carry several experiments on the public CAIL2018 dataset. Experimental results show that our model achieves better or comparable performance on three subtasks compared with the baseline models. Moreover, we also analyze the interpretable contribution of our model.