Low-Resource Court Judgment Summarization for Common Law Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Liu, Shuaiqi, Cao, Jiannong, Li, Yicong, Yang, Ruosong, Wen, Zhiyuan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Liu, Shuaiqi
Cao, Jiannong
Li, Yicong
Yang, Ruosong
Wen, Zhiyuan
author_facet Liu, Shuaiqi
Cao, Jiannong
Li, Yicong
Yang, Ruosong
Wen, Zhiyuan
contents Common law courts need to refer to similar precedents' judgments to inform their current decisions. Generating high-quality summaries of court judgment documents can facilitate legal practitioners to efficiently review previous cases and assist the general public in accessing how the courts operate and how the law is applied. Previous court judgment summarization research focuses on civil law or a particular jurisdiction's judgments. However, judges can refer to the judgments from all common law jurisdictions. Current summarization datasets are insufficient to satisfy the demands of summarizing precedents across multiple jurisdictions, especially when labeled data are scarce for many jurisdictions. To address the lack of datasets, we present CLSum, the first dataset for summarizing multi-jurisdictional common law court judgment documents. Besides, this is the first court judgment summarization work adopting large language models (LLMs) in data augmentation, summary generation, and evaluation. Specifically, we design an LLM-based data augmentation method incorporating legal knowledge. We also propose a legal knowledge enhanced evaluation metric based on LLM to assess the quality of generated judgment summaries. Our experimental results verify that the LLM-based summarization methods can perform well in the few-shot and zero-shot settings. Our LLM-based data augmentation method can mitigate the impact of low data resources. Furthermore, we carry out comprehensive comparative experiments to find essential model components and settings that are capable of enhancing summarization performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_04454
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Low-Resource Court Judgment Summarization for Common Law Systems
Liu, Shuaiqi
Cao, Jiannong
Li, Yicong
Yang, Ruosong
Wen, Zhiyuan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7; I.7
Common law courts need to refer to similar precedents' judgments to inform their current decisions. Generating high-quality summaries of court judgment documents can facilitate legal practitioners to efficiently review previous cases and assist the general public in accessing how the courts operate and how the law is applied. Previous court judgment summarization research focuses on civil law or a particular jurisdiction's judgments. However, judges can refer to the judgments from all common law jurisdictions. Current summarization datasets are insufficient to satisfy the demands of summarizing precedents across multiple jurisdictions, especially when labeled data are scarce for many jurisdictions. To address the lack of datasets, we present CLSum, the first dataset for summarizing multi-jurisdictional common law court judgment documents. Besides, this is the first court judgment summarization work adopting large language models (LLMs) in data augmentation, summary generation, and evaluation. Specifically, we design an LLM-based data augmentation method incorporating legal knowledge. We also propose a legal knowledge enhanced evaluation metric based on LLM to assess the quality of generated judgment summaries. Our experimental results verify that the LLM-based summarization methods can perform well in the few-shot and zero-shot settings. Our LLM-based data augmentation method can mitigate the impact of low data resources. Furthermore, we carry out comprehensive comparative experiments to find essential model components and settings that are capable of enhancing summarization performance.
title Low-Resource Court Judgment Summarization for Common Law Systems
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7; I.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04454