Towards Argument-Aware Abstractive Summarization of Long Legal Opinions with Summary Reranking

Mohamed Elaraby, Yang Zhong, Diane Litman


Abstract
We propose a simple approach for the abstractive summarization of long legal opinions that takes into account the argument structure of the document. Legal opinions often contain complex and nuanced argumentation, making it challenging to generate a concise summary that accurately captures the main points of the legal opinion. Our approach involves using argument role information to generate multiple candidate summaries, then reranking these candidates based on alignment with the document’s argument structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a dataset of long legal opinions and show that it outperforms several strong baselines.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.481
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7601–7612
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.481
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.481
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohamed Elaraby, Yang Zhong, and Diane Litman. 2023. Towards Argument-Aware Abstractive Summarization of Long Legal Opinions with Summary Reranking. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 7601–7612, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Argument-Aware Abstractive Summarization of Long Legal Opinions with Summary Reranking (Elaraby et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.findings-acl.481.pdf