Text Simplification for Legal Domain: {I}nsights and Challenges

Aparna Garimella, Abhilasha Sancheti, Vinay Aggarwal, Ananya Ganesh, Niyati Chhaya, Nandakishore Kambhatla


Abstract
Legal documents such as contracts contain complex and domain-specific jargons, long and nested sentences, and often present with several details that may be difficult to understand for laypeople without domain expertise. In this paper, we explore the problem of text simplification (TS) in legal domain. The main challenge to this is the lack of availability of complex-simple parallel datasets for the legal domain. We investigate some of the existing datasets, methods, and metrics in the TS literature for simplifying legal texts, and perform human evaluation to analyze the gaps. We present some of the challenges involved, and outline a few open questions that need to be addressed for future research in this direction.
Anthology ID:
2022.nllp-1.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Nikolaos Aletras, Ilias Chalkidis, Leslie Barrett, Cătălina Goanță, Daniel Preoțiuc-Pietro
Venue:
NLLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
296–304
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.28
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.nllp-1.28
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aparna Garimella, Abhilasha Sancheti, Vinay Aggarwal, Ananya Ganesh, Niyati Chhaya, and Nandakishore Kambhatla. 2022. Text Simplification for Legal Domain: {I}nsights and Challenges. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022, pages 296–304, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text Simplification for Legal Domain: {I}nsights and Challenges (Garimella et al., NLLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.28.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.28.mp4