A Multi-Source Heterogeneous Knowledge Injected Prompt Learning Method for Legal Charge Prediction

Legal charge prediction, an essential task in legal AI, seeks to assign accurate charge labels to case descriptions, attracting significant recent interest. Existing methods primarily employ diverse neural network structures for modeling case descriptions directly, failing to effectively leverage multi-source external knowledge. We propose a prompt learning framework-based method that simultaneously leverages multi-source heterogeneous external knowledge from a legal knowledge base, a conversational LLM, and related legal articles. Specifically, we match knowledge snippets in case descriptions via the legal knowledge base and encapsulate them into the input through a hard prompt template. Additionally, we retrieve legal articles related to a given case description through contrastive learning, and then obtain factual elements within the case description through a conversational LLM. We fuse the embedding vectors of soft prompt tokens with the encoding vector of factual elements to achieve knowledge-enhanced model forward inference. Experimental results show that our method achieved state-of-the-art results on CAIL-2018, the largest legal charge prediction dataset, and our method has lower data dependency. Case studies also demonstrate our method's strong interpretability.

LawLuo: A Chinese Law Firm Co-run by LLM Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate substantial potential in delivering legal consultation services to users without a legal background, attributed to their superior text comprehension and generation capabilities. Nonetheless, existing Chinese legal LLMs limit interaction to a single model-user dialogue, unlike the collaborative consultations typical of law firms, where multiple staff members contribute to a single consultation. This limitation prevents an authentic consultation experience. Additionally, extant Chinese legal LLMs suffer from critical limitations: (1) insufficient control over the quality of instruction fine-tuning data; (2) increased model hallucination resulting from users' ambiguous queries; and (3) a reduction in the model's ability to follow instructions over multiple dialogue turns. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel legal dialogue framework that leverages the collaborative capabilities of multiple LLM agents, termed LawLuo. This framework encompasses four agents: a receptionist, a lawyer, a secretary, and a boss, each responsible for different functionalities, collaboratively providing a comprehensive legal consultation to users. Additionally, we constructed two high-quality legal dialogue datasets, KINLED and MURLED, and fine-tuned ChatGLM-3-6b using these datasets. We propose a legal query clarification algorithm called ToLC. Experimental results demonstrate that LawLuo outperforms baseline LLMs, including GPT-4, across three dimensions: lawyer-like language style, the usefulness of legal advice, and the accuracy of legal knowledge. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/NEFUJing/LawLuo.

A Novel Hybrid Framework for Hourly PM2.5 Concentration Forecasting Using CEEMDAN and Deep Temporal Convolutional Neural Network

For hourly PM2.5 concentration prediction, accurately capturing the data patterns of external factors that affect PM2.5 concentration changes, and constructing a forecasting model is one of efficient means to improve forecasting accuracy. In this study, a novel hybrid forecasting model based on complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) and deep temporal convolutional neural network (DeepTCN) is developed to predict PM2.5 concentration, by modelling the data patterns of historical pollutant concentrations data, meteorological data, and discrete time variables' data. Taking PM2.5 concentration of Beijing as the sample, experimental results showed that the forecasting accuracy of the proposed CEEMDAN-DeepTCN model is verified to be the highest when compared with the time series model, artificial neural network, and the popular deep learning models. The new model has improved the capability to model the PM2.5-related factor data patterns, and can be used as a promising tool for forecasting PM2.5 concentrations.