Learning to Predict Charges for Criminal Cases with Legal Basis

The charge prediction task is to determine appropriate charges for a given case, which is helpful for legal assistant systems where the user input is fact description. We argue that relevant law articles play an important role in this task, and therefore propose an attention-based neural network method to jointly model the charge prediction task and the relevant article extraction task in a unified framework. The experimental results show that, besides providing legal basis, the relevant articles can also clearly improve the charge prediction results, and our full model can effectively predict appropriate charges for cases with different expression styles.Comment: 10 pages, accepted by EMNLP 201

PLASTIC EXPOSURE AND THE INFANT MICROBIOTA, SCFAs, AND GROWTH TRAJECTORY

Animal models have demonstrated that exposure to plastic and its chemical constituents is associated with altered metabolism and negative health outcomes, including obesity. However, there have been few human studies on the association of plastic exposure during infancy with growth and adiposity, nor have there been any studies to examine whether plastic exposure is associated with altered gut microbiome or microbial metabolites. This question is particularly relevant to infants because prior research has demonstrated that fecal plastic particles are highest among infants. This study assesses the impacts of plastic bottle feeding (every feeding vs. less than every feeding) on the infant microbiome and gut metabolites short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) via fecal samples, and anthropometric measurements, including skinfolds, length for age, and weight-for-length until 1 year of age. Methods: A total of 461 infants from the prospective Nurture pre-birth cohort study were included to examine frequency of plastic bottle feeding at 3 months with anthropometric outcomes at 1 year of age. In addition, a total of 64 and 67 infants were included in analyses on the impact on the gut microbiome and fecal SCFAs, respectively. Microbial taxa were measured by 16S rRNA gene sequencing of the V4 region and SCFA concentrations was quantified using gas chromatography. Results: Infants with less than every feeding plastic bottle at 3 months had a significantly lower alpha diversity at 3 months of age (mean difference= -0.53, 95% CI: -0.90, -0.17) compared to infants with every feeding plastic bottle. Infants with less than every feeding plastic bottle at 3 months had a significantly lower propionic acid concentration at 3 months (mean log difference= -0.53, 95% CI: -1.00, -0.06) compared to infants with every feeding. Infants who were plastic bottle fed 1-3 times/day at 3 months had a significantly lower length for age z-scores at 12 months (mean difference= -0.40, 95% CI: -0.72, -0.07) compared to infants with every feeding plastic bottle. However, such significant differences in alpha diversity, SCFAs, and anthropometric growth variables were not observed at 12 months nor for the change from 3 to 12 months. Conclusion: Findings from the present study suggest that plastic exposure may impact the infant gut microbiome and SCFAs, potentially affecting growth