LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset

TL;DR

LEVEN is the largest Chinese legal event detection dataset, significantly expanding data scale and event types to advance legal case analysis and improve downstream legal tasks.

Contribution

This paper introduces LEVEN, a large-scale Chinese legal event detection dataset with extensive annotations, covering diverse event types to facilitate research and applications.

Findings

LEVEN contains 8,116 documents and 150,977 annotated event mentions.

LED is challenging and requires further research.

Using legal events improves downstream legal tasks.

Abstract

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.