Temporal Expression Recognition in Legal Transcripts

Elizabeth J. Goldstein, Maria Berger


Abstract
In litigation, trial transcripts provide verbatim records of witness testimony, primarily given in response to attorney questioning. To effectively analyze these transcripts, lawyers must often reconstruct events in chronological order—a task that begins with identifying dates associated with testified facts. This paper introduces two datasets for temporal expression extraction from legal transcripts: a primary dataset derived from a lengthy 1995 U.S. criminal trial, and a smaller robustness-testing dataset drawn from seven other legal proceedings. We evaluate semi-supervised approaches for date entity recognition, fine-tuning neural models on weakly labeled training data, and benchmarking them against both small and large language models. Our best-performing models achieve 83% F1-score on the primary dataset (FLAIR rule-modified) and 72% F1-score on the cross-domain, small test set (BERT-cased). These results, alongside our annotated datasets and corresponding experiments, provide a foundation for developing robust date extraction and temporal ordering tools for speech-derived legal text. Moreover, we identify unique challenges for state-of-the-art NER models on legal transcripts, including legal terminology and multiple anchor date resolution.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.478
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
6022–6037
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-478
DOI:
10.63317/5n7bd6gxobss
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elizabeth J. Goldstein and Maria Berger. 2026. Temporal Expression Recognition in Legal Transcripts. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6022–6037, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Temporal Expression Recognition in Legal Transcripts (Goldstein & Berger, LREC 2026)
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