Instead, Let’s get cracking with the world of extractive and abstractive methods for summarizing these documents!
Well, it involves taking a lengthy court decision or judgment and condensing it down into something more manageable. This can be useful for lawyers who need to quickly understand the key points of a case without having to read through pages upon pages of text.
Now, there are two main methods for doing this: extractive and abstractive summarization. Extractive summarization involves selecting specific sentences or paragraphs from the original document that best represent its content. This can be done using various techniques such as keyword extraction or sentence ranking based on importance. On the other hand, abstractive summarization goes a step further by actually generating new text that captures the essence of the original document in a more concise and understandable way.
So which method is better? Well, it depends on your needs! Extractive summarization can be faster to generate since you’re not creating entirely new content from scratch. However, abstractive summarization may provide a more accurate representation of the original text by capturing its underlying meaning and intent. Ultimately, both methods have their own strengths and weaknesses, so it’s up to you to decide which one is best for your specific use case.
Now that we understand what legal case document summarization entails, let’s take a look at some of the research in this area! In 2019, Bhattacharya et al. published a comparative study on summarization algorithms applied to legal case judgments. They found that abstractive methods performed better than extractive ones when it came to capturing important information and maintaining coherence within the summary.
More recently, Shukla et al. presented their work on legal case document summarization at AACL-IJCNLP 2022. Their approach combines both extractive and abstractive methods in order to generate more accurate and comprehensive summaries. They also evaluated their system using three different datasets from the Indian and UK Supreme Court, which allowed them to compare its performance across a variety of legal contexts.
Whether you’re a lawyer looking for an efficient way to review court decisions or just someone interested in AI research, this is definitely a topic worth exploring further. And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll all be able to generate our own abstractive summaries with the click of a button!