MARRO: Multi-headed Attention for Rhetorical Role Labeling in Legal Documents

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Hauptverfasser: Bambroo, Purbid, Adhikary, Subinay, Bhattacharya, Paheli, Chakraborty, Abhijnan, Ghosh, Saptarshi, Ghosh, Kripabandhu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Bambroo, Purbid
Adhikary, Subinay
Bhattacharya, Paheli
Chakraborty, Abhijnan
Ghosh, Saptarshi
Ghosh, Kripabandhu
author_facet Bambroo, Purbid
Adhikary, Subinay
Bhattacharya, Paheli
Chakraborty, Abhijnan
Ghosh, Saptarshi
Ghosh, Kripabandhu
contents Identification of rhetorical roles like facts, arguments, and final judgments is central to understanding a legal case document and can lend power to other downstream tasks like legal case summarization and judgment prediction. However, there are several challenges to this task. Legal documents are often unstructured and contain a specialized vocabulary, making it hard for conventional transformer models to understand them. Additionally, these documents run into several pages, which makes it difficult for neural models to capture the entire context at once. Lastly, there is a dearth of annotated legal documents to train deep learning models. Previous state-of-the-art approaches for this task have focused on using neural models like BiLSTM-CRF or have explored different embedding techniques to achieve decent results. While such techniques have shown that better embedding can result in improved model performance, not many models have focused on utilizing attention for learning better embeddings in sentences of a document. Additionally, it has been recently shown that advanced techniques like multi-task learning can help the models learn better representations, thereby improving performance. In this paper, we combine these two aspects by proposing a novel family of multi-task learning-based models for rhetorical role labeling, named MARRO, that uses transformer-inspired multi-headed attention. Using label shift as an auxiliary task, we show that models from the MARRO family achieve state-of-the-art results on two labeled datasets for rhetorical role labeling, from the Indian and UK Supreme Courts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10659
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MARRO: Multi-headed Attention for Rhetorical Role Labeling in Legal Documents
Bambroo, Purbid
Adhikary, Subinay
Bhattacharya, Paheli
Chakraborty, Abhijnan
Ghosh, Saptarshi
Ghosh, Kripabandhu
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Identification of rhetorical roles like facts, arguments, and final judgments is central to understanding a legal case document and can lend power to other downstream tasks like legal case summarization and judgment prediction. However, there are several challenges to this task. Legal documents are often unstructured and contain a specialized vocabulary, making it hard for conventional transformer models to understand them. Additionally, these documents run into several pages, which makes it difficult for neural models to capture the entire context at once. Lastly, there is a dearth of annotated legal documents to train deep learning models. Previous state-of-the-art approaches for this task have focused on using neural models like BiLSTM-CRF or have explored different embedding techniques to achieve decent results. While such techniques have shown that better embedding can result in improved model performance, not many models have focused on utilizing attention for learning better embeddings in sentences of a document. Additionally, it has been recently shown that advanced techniques like multi-task learning can help the models learn better representations, thereby improving performance. In this paper, we combine these two aspects by proposing a novel family of multi-task learning-based models for rhetorical role labeling, named MARRO, that uses transformer-inspired multi-headed attention. Using label shift as an auxiliary task, we show that models from the MARRO family achieve state-of-the-art results on two labeled datasets for rhetorical role labeling, from the Indian and UK Supreme Courts.
title MARRO: Multi-headed Attention for Rhetorical Role Labeling in Legal Documents
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10659