Classifying Criminal Charges in Chinese for Web-Based Legal Services

Along with the increasing accessibility of the Web, services available on the Web have expanded into several aspects of our lives. As a relatively new comer, Web-based legal services have become another front in the arena. For instance, through such services, people obtain rough pictures of the lawsuits of interest before they decide whether and how to approach their counselors. As a step toward offering online legal services, we propose algorithms for classifying criminal charges in Chinese based on the alleged criminal violations that the district attorney used to prosecute the defendants. The classification is not trivial because some prosecutions involve violations of multiple articles in the criminal law, and we wish to classify lawsuits as precisely as possible. We employ techniques of instance-based classification and introspective learning for the classification task, and achieve satisfactory initial results for classifying charges of larceny and gambling.