D2GCLF: Document-to-Graph Classifier for Legal Document Classification

Legal document classification is an essential task in law intelligence to automate the labor-intensive law case filing process. Unlike traditional document classification problems, legal documents should be classified by reasons and facts instead of topics. We propose a Document-to-Graph Classifier (D2GCLF), which extracts facts as relations between key participants in the law case and represents a legal document with four relation graphs. Each graph is responsible for capturing different relations between the litigation participants. We further develop a graph attention network on top of the four relation graphs to classify the legal documents. Experiments on a real-world legal document dataset show that D2GCLF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy.