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Legal Fact Prediction: The Missing Piece in Legal Judgment Prediction

  • Junkai Liu
  • , Yujie Tong
  • , Hui Huang
  • , Bowen Zheng
  • , Yiran Hu
  • , Peicheng Wu
  • , Chuan Xiao
  • , Makoto Onizuka
  • , Muyun Yang*
  • , Shuyuan Zheng*
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • Harbin Institute of Technology
  • Zhejiang University
  • Tsinghua University
  • The University of Osaka

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Legal judgment prediction (LJP), which enables litigants and their lawyers to forecast judgment outcomes and refine litigation strategies, has emerged as a crucial legal NLP task. Existing studies typically utilize legal facts, i.e., facts that have been established by evidence and determined by the judge, to predict the judgment. However, legal facts are often difficult to obtain in the early stages of litigation, significantly limiting the practical applicability of fact-based LJP. To address this limitation, we propose a novel legal NLP task: legal fact prediction (LFP), which takes the evidence submitted by litigants for trial as input to predict legal facts, thereby empowering fact-based LJP technologies to make predictions in the absence of ground-truth legal facts. We also propose the first benchmark dataset, LFPBench, for evaluating the LFP task. Our extensive experiments on LFPBench demonstrate the effectiveness of LFP-empowered LJP and highlight promising research directions for LFP.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2025 - 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference
EditorsChristos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages6334-6349
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9798891763326
DOIs
StatePublished - 2025
Event30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025 - Suzhou, China
Duration: 4 Nov 20259 Nov 2025

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2025 - 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Conference

Conference

Conference30th Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2025
Country/TerritoryChina
CitySuzhou
Period4/11/259/11/25

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