NIT-Surat@L-Sum: A Semantic Retrieval-Based Framework for Summarizing Indian Judicial Documents

Nita Jadav, Ashok Urlana, Pruthwik Mishra


Abstract
The shared task of Legal Summarization (L-Summ) focuses on generating abstractive summaries for the Indian court judgments in English. This task presents unique challenges in producing fluent, relevant, and legally appropriate summaries given voluminous judgment texts. We experiment with different sequence-to-sequence models and present a comprehensive comparative study of their performance. We also evaluate various Large Language Models (LLM) with zero-shot settings for testing their summarization capabilities. Our best performing model is fine-tuned on a pre-trained legal summarization model where relevant passages are identified using the maximum marginal relevance(MMR) technique. Our findings highlight that retrieval-augmented fine-tuning is an effective approach for generating precise and concise legal summaries. We obtained a rank of 5th overall.
Anthology ID:
2025.justnlp-main.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Empowering Justice (JUST-NLP 2025)
Month:
December
Year:
2025
Address:
Mumbai, India
Editors:
Ashutosh Modi, Saptarshi Ghosh, Asif Ekbal, Pawan Goyal, Sarika Jain, Abhinav Joshi, Shivani Mishra, Debtanu Datta, Shounak Paul, Kshetrimayum Boynao Singh, Sandeep Kumar
Venues:
JUSTNLP | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
133–141
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.justnlp-main.14/
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Cite (ACL):
Nita Jadav, Ashok Urlana, and Pruthwik Mishra. 2025. NIT-Surat@L-Sum: A Semantic Retrieval-Based Framework for Summarizing Indian Judicial Documents. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Empowering Justice (JUST-NLP 2025), pages 133–141, Mumbai, India. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NIT-Surat@L-Sum: A Semantic Retrieval-Based Framework for Summarizing Indian Judicial Documents (Jadav et al., JUSTNLP 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.justnlp-main.14.pdf