Modeling dynamic pairwise attention for crime classification over legal articles

In juridical field, judges usually need to consult several relevant cases to determine the specific articles that the evidence violated, which is a task that is time consuming and needs extensive professional knowledge. In this paper, we focus on how to save the manual efforts and make the conviction process more efficient. Specifically, we treat the evidences as documents, and articles as labels, thus the conviction process can be cast as a multi-label classification problem. However, the challenge in this specific scenario lies in two aspects. One is that the number of articles that evidences violated is dynamic, which we denote as the label dynamic problem. The other is that most articles are violated by only a few of the evidences, which we denote as the label imbalance problem. Previous methods usually learn the multi-label classification model and the label thresholds independently, and may ignore the label imbalance problem. To tackle with both challenges, we propose a unified D ynamic P airwise A ttention M odel (DPAM for short) in this paper. Specifically, DPAM adopts the multi-task learning paradigm to learn the multi-label classifier and the threshold predictor jointly, and thus DPAM can improve the generalization performance by leveraging the information learned in both of the two tasks. In addition, a pairwise attention model based on article definitions is incorporated into the classification model to help alleviate the label imbalance problem. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods.