Legal Extractive Summarization of U.S. Court Opinions

15 May 2023  ·  Emmanuel Bauer, Dominik Stammbach, Nianlong Gu, Elliott Ash ·

This paper tackles the task of legal extractive summarization using a dataset of 430K U.S. court opinions with key passages annotated. According to automated summary quality metrics, the reinforcement-learning-based MemSum model is best and even out-performs transformer-based models. In turn, expert human evaluation shows that MemSum summaries effectively capture the key points of lengthy court opinions. Motivated by these results, we open-source our models to the general public. This represents progress towards democratizing law and making U.S. court opinions more accessible to the general public.

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