SECaps: A Sequence Enhanced Capsule Model for Charge Prediction
  Automatic charge prediction aims to predict appropriate final charges
according to the fact descriptions for a given criminal case. Automatic charge
prediction plays a critical role in assisting judges and lawyers to improve the
efficiency of legal decisions, and thus has received much attention.
Nevertheless, most existing works on automatic charge prediction perform
adequately on high-frequency charges but are not yet capable of predicting
few-shot charges with limited cases. In this paper, we propose a Sequence
Enhanced Capsule model, dubbed as SECaps model, to relieve this problem.
Specifically, following the work of capsule networks, we propose the seq-caps
layer, which considers sequence information and spatial information of legal
texts simultaneously. Then we design a attention residual unit, which provides
auxiliary information for charge prediction. In addition, our SECaps model
introduces focal loss, which relieves the problem of imbalanced charges.
Comparing the state-of-the-art methods, our SECaps model obtains 4.5% and 6.4%
absolutely considerable improvements under Macro F1 in Criminal-S and
Criminal-L respectively. The experimental results consistently demonstrate the
superiorities and competitiveness of our proposed model.
