A Neural Network model for Indian Supreme Court legal judgment prediction

Abstract

Industry experts are motivated to collect, collate, and analyse historical data in the legal sector in attempt to predict court case outcomes as the amount of historical data available in this field has increased over time. But using judicial data to predict and defend court judgements is no simple undertaking. Using Machine Learning (ML) models and traditional approaches for categorical feature encoding, previous research on predicting court outcomes using limited experimental datasets produced a number of unexpected predictions. The paper proposes an ensemble model combining Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), attention mechanism and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) algorithm. This model is primarily based on a self-attention network, which could simultaneously capture linguistic relationships over lengthy sequences like RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) and is nevertheless speedy to train like CNN. C-XGB can obtain accuracy that surpasses the state-of-art model on numerous classification/prediction tasks simultaneously as being twice as speedy to train. The proposed C-XGB model is designed to process the documents hierarchically and calculates the attention weights. Two convolutional layers are used to calculate the attention weights, one at the word level and another at the sentence level. And finally, at the last layer, the XGB algorithm predicts the input case file’s outcome. The experimental results shows that the proposed model outperforms the existing model with 4.67% improvement in accuracy value.