A Novel Sequence Tagging Framework for Consumer Event-Cause Extraction

Consumer Event-Cause Extraction, the task aimed at extracting the potential causes behind certain events in the text, has gained much attention in recent years due to its wide applications. The ICDM 2020 conference sets up an evaluation competition that aims to extract events and the causes of the extracted events with a specified subject (a brand or product). In this task, we mainly focus on how to construct an end-to-end model, and extract multiple event types and event-causes simultaneously. To this end, we introduce a fresh perspective to revisit the relational event-cause extraction task and propose a novel sequence tagging framework, instead of extracting event types and events-causes separately. Experiments show our framework outperforms baseline methods even when its encoder module uses an initialized pre-trained BERT encoder, showing the power of the new tagging framework. In this competition, our team achieved 1st place in the first stage leaderboard, and 3rd place in the final stage leaderboard.

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 pre-diction plays an important role in assisting judges and lawyers to improve the effi-ciency of legal decisions, and thus has received much attention. Nevertheless, most existing works on automatic charge prediction perform adequately on those high-frequency charges but are not yet capable of predicting few-shot charges with lim-ited cases. On the other hand, some works have shown the benefits of capsule net-work, which is a powerful technique. This motivates us to propose a Sequence En-hanced Capsule model, dubbed as SECaps model, to relieve this problem. More specifically, we propose a new basic structure, seq-caps layer, to enhance capsule by taking sequence information in to account. In addition, we construct our SE-Caps model by making use of seq-caps layer. Comparing the state-of-the-art meth-ods, our SECaps model achieves 4.5% and 6.4% F1 promotion in two real-world datasets, Criminal-S and Criminal-L, respectively. The experimental results consis-tently demonstrate the superiorities and competitiveness of our proposed model.