ALJP: An Arabic Legal Judgment Prediction in Personal Status Cases Using Machine Learning Models

TL;DR

This paper presents an Arabic legal judgment prediction system using machine learning and NLP techniques, achieving high accuracy in predicting outcomes of custody and marriage annulment cases, aiding legal professionals and litigants.

Contribution

First to develop an Arabic LJP system utilizing deep learning and NLP, with multiple models and techniques, demonstrating high accuracy in real legal case prediction.

Findings

SVM with word2vec achieved 88% accuracy in custody cases.

LR with TF-IDF achieved 78% accuracy in annulment cases.

The system effectively predicts case outcomes, aiding legal decision-making.

Abstract

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) aims to predict judgment outcomes based on case description. Several researchers have developed techniques to assist potential clients by predicting the outcome in the legal profession. However, none of the proposed techniques were implemented in Arabic, and only a few attempts were implemented in English, Chinese, and Hindi. In this paper, we develop a system that utilizes deep learning (DL) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques to predict the judgment outcome from Arabic case scripts, especially in cases of custody and annulment of marriage. This system will assist judges and attorneys in improving their work and time efficiency while reducing sentencing disparity. In addition, it will help litigants, lawyers, and law students analyze the probable outcomes of any given case before trial. We use a different machine and deep learning models such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic regression (LR), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) using representation techniques such as TF-IDF and word2vec on the developed dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with the five baseline methods, the SVM model with word2vec and LR with TF-IDF achieve the highest accuracy of 88% and 78% in predicting the judgment on custody cases and annulment of marriage, respectively. Furthermore, the LR and SVM with word2vec and BiLSTM model with TF-IDF achieved the highest accuracy of 88% and 69% in predicting the probability of outcomes on custody cases and annulment of marriage, respectively.