Legal Judgment Prediction in the Saudi Arabian Commercial Court

Ashwaq Almalki, Safa Alsafari () and Noura M. Alotaibi
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Ashwaq Almalki: Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, College of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Jeddah, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
Safa Alsafari: Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, College of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Jeddah, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
Noura M. Alotaibi: Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, College of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Jeddah, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia

Future Internet, 2025, vol. 17, issue 10, 1-21

Abstract: Legal judgment prediction is an emerging application of artificial intelligence in the legal domain, offering significant potential to enhance legal decision support systems. Such systems can improve judicial efficiency, reduce burdens on legal professionals, and assist in early-stage case assessment. This study focused on predicting whether a legal case would be Accepted or Rejected using only the Fact section of court rulings. A key challenge lay in processing long legal documents, which often exceeded the input length limitations of transformer-based models. To address this, we proposed a two-step methodology: first, each document was segmented into sentence-level inputs compatible with AraBERT—a pretrained Arabic transformer model—to generate sentence-level predictions; second, these predictions were aggregated to produce a document-level decision using several methods, including Mean, Max, Confidence-Weighted, and Positional aggregation. We evaluated the approach on a dataset of 19,822 real-world cases collected from the Saudi Arabian Commercial Court. Among all aggregation methods, the Confidence-Weighted method applied to the AraBERT-based classifier achieved the highest performance, with an overall accuracy of 85.62%. The results demonstrated that combining sentence-level modeling with effective aggregation methods provides a scalable and accurate solution for Arabic legal judgment prediction, enabling full-length document processing without truncation.

Keywords: Arabic NLP; AraBERT; classification; judgment prediction; legal judgment; LegalAI; LJP; segmentation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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