Extracting the Gist of Chinese Judgments of the Supreme Court

The gist of judgement documents encodes important experience and viewpoints of the Supreme Court, and provides instrumental and educational information for judges, lawyers, practitioners, and students. The Supreme Court in Taiwan appoints senior members to produce the gist for selected judgments of the Supreme Court, but is unable to offer the gist for all judgment documents. Based on our observation of the existing gist statements, we can treat the generation of the gist as a sentence classification problem. We apply machine-learning methods, including gradient boosting, multilayer perceptrons, and deep learning methods with long short-term memory units; and consider legal, linguistic, statistical information, and different word embedding methods to build several classifiers. By using more sophisticated classifiers and more relevant features, we gradually achieved better results, and the best result was 0.9372 in F1 measure.