LexAbSumm: Aspect-based Summarization of Legal Decisions
This addresses the need for more tailored information retrieval for legal professionals, but it is incremental as it focuses on dataset creation and evaluation rather than a new method.
The authors tackled the problem of generic summaries in legal documents by introducing LexAbSumm, a dataset for aspect-based summarization of legal case decisions from the European Court of Human Rights, and found that existing abstractive models struggle to produce aspect-specific summaries.
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.