LexAbSumm: Aspect-based Summarization of Legal Decisions

Santosh T.y.s.s., Mahmoud Aly, Matthias Grabmair


Abstract
Legal professionals frequently encounter long legal judgments that hold critical insights for their work. While recent advances have led to automated summarization solutions for legal documents, they typically provide generic summaries, which may not meet the diverse information needs of users. To address this gap, we introduce LexAbSumm, a novel dataset designed for aspect-based summarization of legal case decisions, sourced from the European Court of Human Rights jurisdiction. We evaluate several abstractive summarization models tailored for longer documents on LexAbSumm, revealing a challenge in conditioning these models to produce aspect-specific summaries. We release LexAbSum to facilitate research in aspect-based summarization for legal domain.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.911
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
10422–10431
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.911
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Santosh T.y.s.s., Mahmoud Aly, and Matthias Grabmair. 2024. LexAbSumm: Aspect-based Summarization of Legal Decisions. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 10422–10431, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
LexAbSumm: Aspect-based Summarization of Legal Decisions (T.y.s.s. et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.911.pdf