Structural Text Segmentation of Legal Documents

TL;DR

This paper introduces a transformer-based system for segmenting legal documents by detecting topical changes, improving the coherence and utility of document representations for legal information retrieval.

Contribution

It presents a novel topical change detection approach for legal document segmentation using transformer models and a large annotated dataset of Terms-of-Service documents.

Findings

Significantly outperforms baseline segmentation methods

Effectively adapts to legal document structures

Provides publicly available data and models

Abstract

The growing complexity of legal cases has lead to an increasing interest in legal information retrieval systems that can effectively satisfy user-specific information needs. However, such downstream systems typically require documents to be properly formatted and segmented, which is often done with relatively simple pre-processing steps, disregarding topical coherence of segments. Systems generally rely on representations of individual sentences or paragraphs, which may lack crucial context, or document-level representations, which are too long for meaningful search results. To address this issue, we propose a segmentation system that can predict topical coherence of sequential text segments spanning several paragraphs, effectively segmenting a document and providing a more balanced representation for downstream applications. We build our model on top of popular transformer networks and formulate structural text segmentation as topical change detection, by performing a series of independent classifications that allow for efficient fine-tuning on task-specific data. We crawl a novel dataset consisting of roughly $74,000$ online Terms-of-Service documents, including hierarchical topic annotations, which we use for training. Results show that our proposed system significantly outperforms baselines, and adapts well to structural peculiarities of legal documents. We release both data and trained models to the research community for future work.https://github.com/dennlinger/TopicalChange