Integrating domain knowledge in AI-assisted criminal sentencing of drug trafficking cases

Abstract

Judgment prediction is the task of predicting various outcomes of legal cases of which sentencing prediction is one of the most important yet difficult challenges. We study the applicability of machine learning (ML) techniques in predicting prison terms of drug trafficking cases. In particular, we study how legal domain knowledge can be integrated with ML models to construct highly accurate predictors. We illustrate how our criminal sentence predictors can be applied to address four important issues in legal knowledge management, which include (1) discovery of model drifts in legal rules, (2) identification of critical features in legal judgments, (3) fairness in machine predictions, and (4) explainability of machine predictions.