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Improving abstractive summarization of legal rulings through textual entailment

Improving abstractive summarization of legal rulings through textual entailment The standard approach for abstractive text summarization is to use an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder is responsible for capturing the general meaning from the source text, and the decoder is in charge of generating the final text summary. While this approach can compose summaries that resemble human writing, some may contain unrelated or unfaithful information. This problem is called “hallucination” and it represents a serious issue in legal texts as legal practitioners rely on these summaries when looking for precedents, used to support legal arguments. Another concern is that legal documents tend to be very long and may not be fed entirely to the encoder. We propose our method called LegalSumm for addressing these issues by creating different “views” over the source text, training summarization models to generate independent versions of summaries, and applying entailment module to judge how faithful these candidate summaries are with respect to the source text. We show that the proposed approach can select candidate summaries that improve ROUGE scores in all metrics evaluated. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Artificial Intelligence and Law Springer Journals

Improving abstractive summarization of legal rulings through textual entailment

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Publisher
Springer Journals
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021
ISSN
0924-8463
eISSN
1572-8382
DOI
10.1007/s10506-021-09305-4
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

The standard approach for abstractive text summarization is to use an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder is responsible for capturing the general meaning from the source text, and the decoder is in charge of generating the final text summary. While this approach can compose summaries that resemble human writing, some may contain unrelated or unfaithful information. This problem is called “hallucination” and it represents a serious issue in legal texts as legal practitioners rely on these summaries when looking for precedents, used to support legal arguments. Another concern is that legal documents tend to be very long and may not be fed entirely to the encoder. We propose our method called LegalSumm for addressing these issues by creating different “views” over the source text, training summarization models to generate independent versions of summaries, and applying entailment module to judge how faithful these candidate summaries are with respect to the source text. We show that the proposed approach can select candidate summaries that improve ROUGE scores in all metrics evaluated.

Journal

Artificial Intelligence and Law – Springer Journals

Published: Mar 1, 2023

Keywords: Legal ruling summarization; Abstractive summarizer; Content digest; Legal case brief; Summary writing; Abstract generator; Automatic text summary; Textual entailment; Fact checking

References

  • Automatic text structuring and categorization as a first step in summarizing legal cases
    Moens, MF; Uyttendaele, C
  • Efficient content-based sparse attention with routing transformers
    Roy, A; Saffar, M; Vaswani, A; Grangier, D
  • Text retrieval in the legal world
    Turtle, H