Abstractive Summarization of Dutch Court Verdicts Using Sequence-to-sequence Models

Marijn Schraagen, Floris Bex, Nick Van De Luijtgaarden, Daniël Prijs


Abstract
With the legal sector embracing digitization, the increasing availability of information has led to a need for systems that can automatically summarize legal documents. Most existing research on legal text summarization has so far focused on extractive models, which can result in awkward summaries, as sentences in legal documents can be very long and detailed. In this study, we apply two abstractive summarization models on a Dutch legal domain dataset. The results show that existing models transfer quite well across domains and languages: the ROUGE scores of our experiments are comparable to state-of-the-art studies on English news article texts. Examining one of the models showed the capability of rewriting long legal sentences to much shorter ones, using mostly vocabulary from the source document. Human evaluation shows that for both models hand-made summaries are still perceived as more relevant and readable, and automatic summaries do not always capture elements such as background, considerations and judgement. Still, generated summaries are valuable if only a keyword summary or no summary at all is present.
Anthology ID:
2022.nllp-1.7
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:
76–87
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.nllp-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marijn Schraagen, Floris Bex, Nick Van De Luijtgaarden, and Daniël Prijs. 2022. Abstractive Summarization of Dutch Court Verdicts Using Sequence-to-sequence Models. In Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2022, pages 76–87, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Abstractive Summarization of Dutch Court Verdicts Using Sequence-to-sequence Models (Schraagen et al., NLLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.7.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.nllp-1.7.mp4