Effective deep learning approaches for summarization of legal texts

Abstract

The availability of legal judgment documents in digital form offers numerous opportunities for information extraction and application. Automatic summarization of these legal texts is a crucial and a challenging task due to the unusual structure and high complexity of these documents. Previous approaches in this direction have relied on huge labelled datasets, using hand engineered features, leveraging on domain knowledge and focussed their attention on a narrow sub-domain for increased effectiveness. In this paper, we propose simple generic techniques using neural network for the summarization task for Indian legal judgment documents. We explore two neural network architectures for this task utilizing the word and sentence embeddings for capturing the semantics. The main advantage of the proposed approaches is that they do not rely on hand crafted features, or domain specific knowledge, nor is their application restricted to a particular sub-domain thus making them suitable to be extended to other domains as well. We tackle the problem of unavailability of labelled data for the task by assigning classes/scores to sentences in the training set, based on their match with reference summary produced by humans. The experimental evaluations establish the effectiveness of our proposed approaches as compared with other baselines.

Keywords

• Legal text summarization
• Natural language processing
• Deep learning
• Sentence embeddings