Summarization of legal case judgement documents is a challenging problem in Legal NLP. However, not much analyses exist on how different families of summarization models (e.g., extractive vs. abstractive) perform when applied to legal case documents. This question is particularly important since many recent transformer-based abstractive summarization models have restrictions on the number of input tokens, and legal documents are known to be very long. Also, it is an open question on how best to evaluate legal case document summarization systems. In this paper, we carry out extensive experiments with several extractive and abstractive summarization methods (both supervised and unsupervised) over three legal summarization datasets that we have developed. Our analyses, that includes evaluation by law practitioners, lead to several interesting insights on legal summarization in specific and long document summarization in general.

Structured Sentiment Analysis (SSA) deals with extracting opinion tuples in a text, where each tuple (h, e, t, p) consists of h, the holder, who expresses a sentiment polarity p towards a target t through a sentiment expression e. While prior works explore graph-based or sequence labeling-based approaches for the task, we in this paper present a novel unified generative method to solve SSA, a SemEval2022 shared task. We leverage a BART-based encoder-decoder architecture and suitably modify it to generate, given a sentence, a sequence of opinion tuples. Each generated tuple consists of seven integers respectively representing the indices corresponding to the start and end positions of the holder, target, and expression spans, followed by the sentiment polarity class associated between the target and the sentiment expression. We perform rigorous experiments for both Monolingual and Cross-lingual subtasks, and achieve competitive Sentiment F1 scores on the leaderboard in both settings.

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) deals with extracting opinion triplets, consisting of an opinion target or aspect, its associated sentiment, and the corresponding opinion term/span explaining the rationale behind the sentiment. Existing research efforts are majorly tagging-based. Among the methods taking a sequence tagging approach, some fail to capture the strong interdependence between the three opinion factors, whereas others fall short of identifying triplets with overlapping aspect/opinion spans. A recent grid tagging approach on the other hand fails to capture the span-level semantics while predicting the sentiment between an aspect-opinion pair. Different from these, we present a tagging-free solution for the task, while addressing the limitations of the existing works. We adapt an encoder-decoder architecture with a Pointer Network-based decoding framework that generates an entire opinion triplet at each time step thereby making our solution end-to-end. Interactions between the aspects and opinions are effectively captured by the decoder by considering their entire detected spans while predicting their connecting sentiment. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets establish the better efficacy of our proposed approach, especially in recall, and in predicting multiple and aspect/opinion-overlapped triplets from the same review sentence. We report our results both with and without BERT and also demonstrate the utility of domain-specific BERT post-training for the task.