Hierarchical Long-Document Summarization using LED for Legal Judgments

Reshma Sheik, Noah John Puthayathu, Fathima Firose A, Jonathan Paul


Abstract
This paper describes our system for the L-SUMM shared task on legal document summarization. Our approach is built on the Longformer Encoder-Decoder (LED) model, which we augment with a multi-level summarization strategy tailored for legal documents that are substantially longer than typical transformer input limits. The system achieved competitive performance on the legal judgment summarization task through optimized training strategies, including gradient accumulation, Adafactor optimization, and hyperparameter tuning. Our findings indicate that combining hierarchical processing with strategically assigned global attention enables more reliable summarization of lengthy legal texts.
Anthology ID:
2025.justnlp-main.22
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
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
191–195
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.justnlp-main.22/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Reshma Sheik, Noah John Puthayathu, Fathima Firose A, and Jonathan Paul. 2025. Hierarchical Long-Document Summarization using LED for Legal Judgments. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Empowering Justice (JUST-NLP 2025), pages 191–195, Mumbai, India. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Hierarchical Long-Document Summarization using LED for Legal Judgments (Sheik et al., JUSTNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-ijcnlp-aacl/2025.justnlp-main.22.pdf