IL-TUR: Benchmark for Indian Legal Text Understanding and Reasoning
This addresses the problem of automating legal document processing for the Indian legal system, but it is incremental as it introduces a new benchmark rather than a novel method.
The paper tackles the challenge of evaluating NLP models for legal documents by proposing IL-TUR, a benchmark for Indian legal text understanding and reasoning, which includes tasks in multiple languages and shows gaps between baseline models and ground truth.
Legal systems worldwide are inundated with exponential growth in cases and documents. There is an imminent need to develop NLP and ML techniques for automatically processing and understanding legal documents to streamline the legal system. However, evaluating and comparing various NLP models designed specifically for the legal domain is challenging. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing IL-TUR: Benchmark for Indian Legal Text Understanding and Reasoning. IL-TUR contains monolingual (English, Hindi) and multi-lingual (9 Indian languages) domain-specific tasks that address different aspects of the legal system from the point of view of understanding and reasoning over Indian legal documents. We present baseline models (including LLM-based) for each task, outlining the gap between models and the ground truth. To foster further research in the legal domain, we create a leaderboard (available at: https://exploration-lab.github.io/IL-TUR/) where the research community can upload and compare legal text understanding systems.