Debate-Driven Legal Reasoning: Disambiguating Confusing Charges Through Multi-agent Debate
摘要
Confusing charges are challenging to predict due to the substantial overlap in their legal elements, which complicates the identification of subtle differentiating factors. Accurately distinguishing these charges necessitates a deep understanding of domain-specific legal nuances and the application of intricate reasoning processes. To enable a more distinctive and nuanced analysis of multiple confusing charges, this paper introduces the Debate-Driven Legal Reasoning (DDLR) framework, a novel multi-agent debate approach that simulates legal argumentation to disambiguate charges. In DDLR, agents take specific stances on candidate charges, refining their reasoning via contradiction detection and fact-statute alignment in turn-based debates. The debate is managed by adjudication mechanisms to ensure both efficiency and accuracy. Evaluated on three Chinese legal datasets, DDLR achieves significant improvements, outperforming baselines by 4.3%-17.0% in charge prediction accuracy and generating court views with higher semantic fidelity.