Modeling legal reasoning and argumentation justifying decisions in cases has always been central to AI & Law, yet contemporary developments in legal NLP have increasingly focused on statistically classifying legal conclusions from text. While conceptually “simpler’, these approaches often fall short in providing usable justifications connecting to appropriate legal concepts. This paper reviews both traditional symbolic works in AI & Law and recent advances in legal NLP, and distills possibilities of integrating expert-informed knowledge to strike a balance between scalability and explanation in symbolic vs. data-driven approaches. We identify open challenges and discuss the potential of modern NLP models and methods that integrate conceptual legal knowledge.

Human evaluation remains the gold standard for assessing abstractive summarization. However, current practices often prioritize constructing evaluation guidelines for fluency, coherence, and factual accuracy, overlooking other critical dimensions. In this paper, we investigate argument coverage in abstractive summarization by focusing on long legal opinions, where summaries must effectively encapsulate the document’s argumentative nature. We introduce a set of human-evaluation guidelines to evaluate generated summaries based on argumentative coverage. These guidelines enable us to assess three distinct summarization models, studying the influence of including argument roles in summarization. Furthermore, we utilize these evaluation scores to benchmark automatic summarization metrics against argument coverage, providing insights into the effectiveness of automated evaluation methods.

Legal texts routinely use concepts that are difficult to understand. Lawyers elaborate on the meaning of such concepts by, among other things, carefully investigating how they have been used in the past. Finding text snippets that mention a particular concept in a useful way is tedious, time-consuming, and hence expensive. We assembled a data set of 26,959 sentences, coming from legal case decisions, and labeled them in terms of their usefulness for explaining selected legal concepts. Using the dataset we study the effectiveness of transformer models pre-trained on large language corpora to detect which of the sentences are useful. In light of models’ predictions, we analyze various linguistic properties of the explanatory sentences as well as their relationship to the legal concept that needs to be explained. We show that the transformer-based models are capable of learning surprisingly sophisticated features and outperform the prior approaches to the task.