STARD: A Chinese Statute Retrieval Dataset with Real Queries Issued by Non-professionals

Statute retrieval aims to find relevant statutory articles for specific queries. This process is the basis of a wide range of legal applications such as legal advice, automated judicial decisions, legal document drafting, etc. Existing statute retrieval benchmarks focus on formal and professional queries from sources like bar exams and legal case documents, thereby neglecting non-professional queries from the general public, which often lack precise legal terminology and references. To address this gap, we introduce the STAtute Retrieval Dataset (STARD), a Chinese dataset comprising 1,543 query cases collected from real-world legal consultations and 55,348 candidate statutory articles. Unlike existing statute retrieval datasets, which primarily focus on professional legal queries, STARD captures the complexity and diversity of real queries from the general public. Through a comprehensive evaluation of various retrieval baselines, we reveal that existing retrieval approaches all fall short of these real queries issued by non-professional users. The best method only achieves a Recall@100 of 0.907, suggesting the necessity for further exploration and additional research in this area. All the codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/oneal2000/STARD/tree/main

MUSER: A Multi-View Similar Case Retrieval Dataset

Similar case retrieval (SCR) is a representative legal AI application that plays a pivotal role in promoting judicial fairness. However, existing SCR datasets only focus on the fact description section when judging the similarity between cases, ignoring other valuable sections (e.g., the court's opinion) that can provide insightful reasoning process behind. Furthermore, the case similarities are typically measured solely by the textual semantics of the fact descriptions, which may fail to capture the full complexity of legal cases from the perspective of legal knowledge. In this work, we present MUSER, a similar case retrieval dataset based on multi-view similarity measurement and comprehensive legal element with sentence-level legal element annotations. Specifically, we select three perspectives (legal fact, dispute focus, and law statutory) and build a comprehensive and structured label schema of legal elements for each of them, to enable accurate and knowledgeable evaluation of case similarities. The constructed dataset originates from Chinese civil cases and contains 100 query cases and 4,024 candidate cases. We implement several text classification algorithms for legal element prediction and various retrieval methods for retrieving similar cases on MUSER. The experimental results indicate that incorporating legal elements can benefit the performance of SCR models, but further efforts are still required to address the remaining challenges posed by MUSER. The source code and dataset are released at https://github.com/THUlawtech/MUSER.

The Devil is in the Details: On the Pitfalls of Event Extraction Evaluation

Event extraction (EE) is a crucial task aiming at extracting events from texts, which includes two subtasks: event detection (ED) and event argument extraction (EAE). In this paper, we check the reliability of EE evaluations and identify three major pitfalls: (1) The data preprocessing discrepancy makes the evaluation results on the same dataset not directly comparable, but the data preprocessing details are not widely noted and specified in papers. (2) The output space discrepancy of different model paradigms makes different-paradigm EE models lack grounds for comparison and also leads to unclear mapping issues between predictions and annotations. (3) The absence of pipeline evaluation of many EAE-only works makes them hard to be directly compared with EE works and may not well reflect the model performance in real-world pipeline scenarios. We demonstrate the significant influence of these pitfalls through comprehensive meta-analyses of recent papers and empirical experiments. To avoid these pitfalls, we suggest a series of remedies, including specifying data preprocessing, standardizing outputs, and providing pipeline evaluation results. To help implement these remedies, we develop a consistent evaluation framework OMNIEVENT, which can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/OmniEvent.

LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset

Recognizing facts is the most fundamental step in making judgments, hence detecting events in the legal documents is important to legal case analysis tasks. However, existing Legal Event Detection (LED) datasets only concern incomprehensive event types and have limited annotated data, which restricts the development of LED methods and their downstream applications. To alleviate these issues, we present LEVEN a large-scale Chinese LEgal eVENt detection dataset, with 8,116 legal documents and 150,977 human-annotated event mentions in 108 event types. Not only charge-related events, LEVEN also covers general events, which are critical for legal case understanding but neglected in existing LED datasets. To our knowledge, LEVEN is the largest LED dataset and has dozens of times the data scale of others, which shall significantly promote the training and evaluation of LED methods. The results of extensive experiments indicate that LED is challenging and needs further effort. Moreover, we simply utilize legal events as side information to promote downstream applications. The method achieves improvements of average 2.2 points precision in low-resource judgment prediction, and 1.5 points mean average precision in unsupervised case retrieval, which suggests the fundamentality of LED. The source code and dataset can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/LEVEN.