arXiv AI

Shortcut Learning in Legal Judgment Prediction: Empirical Evidence from the UK Employment Tribunal

arXiv:2607. 04261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is constrained by its reliance on post-hoc judicial materials, increasing the likelihood that models perform retrospective classification rather than true forecasting.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Legal text classification in Korean sexual offense cases: from traditional machine learning to large language models with XAI insights

The paper evaluates legal text classification models for Korean sexual offense cases, comparing traditional machine learning, large language models, and fine‑tuned domain models. Fine‑tuned KLUE‑BERT achieved the highest accuracy of 99.3%, outperforming GPT‑3.5, GPT‑4.0, and other traditional approaches. Explainable AI techniques were used to analyze predictions, revealing linguistic features that influence decisions and highlighting limitations in capturing subtle textual cues, especially in real‑world KICS data.

By Jeongmin Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 3

OBJECTION! Lawyer Agents Mitigate Guilty Bias in Legal Judgment Prediction

The paper introduces OBJECTION, an inference-time pipeline that adds an Adversarial Lawyer Agent to each of the three reasoning steps—offense, unlawfulness, and culpability—in legal judgment prediction models. By actively injecting defense arguments, the agent challenges the model’s default assumption of guilt, which is common in datasets biased toward guilty outcomes. Using a new Natural Innocent dataset of 3.4k real cases, OBJECTION reduces the False Guilty Rate from 82.93% to 16.69%, demonstrating significant improvement in substantive legal reasoning.

By Jaehoon Jeong, Jay-Yoon Lee
arXiv AI
Aug 11

PROSLEX: A Novel Dataset for Expert-Annotated Legal Statute Prediction for Indian Judiciary

arXiv:2608. 08830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal Statute Prediction (LSP) involves automatically identifying relevant legal statutes given factual descriptions in legal documents, typically framed as a multi-label classification task within natural language processing and information retrieval research.

By Subinay Adhikary, Upal Bhattacharya, Vivek Kumar Singh, Anurag Sharma, Shubham Kumar Nigam, Suvasis Das, Shouvik Kumar Guha, Koustav Rudra, Kripabandhu Ghosh
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Stop Removing Stopwords: How an Inherited Preprocessing Default Distorts Legal Text-as-Data

The paper critiques the common practice of stopword removal in legal text analysis, showing that standard stoplists actually degrade performance on binary classification tasks involving Supreme Court opinions. By exhaustively testing the removal of each of ~18,500 candidate words, the authors find that no stoplist—generic or optimized—outperforms a no‑removal baseline, and that models cannot predict which words are beneficial to remove. The study argues that inherited preprocessing defaults can distort the doctrinal and ideological signals that legal scholars aim to recover, calling into question the validity of such practices.

By Gregory M. Dickinson
arXiv AI
Jun 18

TW-LegalBench: Measuring Taiwanese Legal Understanding

arXiv:2606. 18699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their performance on jurisdiction-specific legal reasoning remains underexplored.

By Fei-Yueh Chen, Chun Huang Lin, Chan Wei Hsu, Kuan Hsuan Yeh, Zih-Ching Chen, Kuan-Ming Chen, Patrick Chung-Chia Huang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Before the Arrest: Benchmarking LLMs on Criminal Profiling from Incomplete Evidence

The paper introduces the Profiling, Investigation, and Judgment (PIJ) benchmark, which contains 2,500 real homicide cases from five countries to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on pre‑arrest criminal investigation tasks. It assesses LLMs across criminal profiling, crime process reconstruction, and sentence prediction, revealing that performance drops as tasks require more implicit reasoning about unknown suspect profiles. The study finds that LLMs lag behind human experts, especially on inferential tasks like motivation and victim‑offender relationships, and exhibit biases in gender, age, and motive attribution.

By Yutong Yao, Yanjie Cao, Guanhua Chen, Xu Yang, Junchao Wu, Zeyu Wu, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

Before the Arrest: Benchmarking LLMs on Criminal Profiling from Incomplete Evidence

The paper introduces the Profiling, Investigation, and Judgment (PIJ) benchmark, which contains 2,500 real homicide cases from five countries to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on pre‑arrest criminal investigation tasks. It assesses LLMs across criminal profiling, crime process reconstruction, and sentence prediction, revealing that performance drops as tasks require more implicit reasoning about unknown suspect profiles. The study finds that LLMs lag behind human experts, especially in inferential categories like motivation and victim‑offender relationships, and exhibit biases in gender, age, and motive attribution.