CoPERLex: Content Planning with Event-based Representations for Legal Case Summarization

TL;DR

CoPERLex is a framework that enhances legal case summarization by using event-based content planning, improving the coherence and relevance of summaries through structured representations of legal narratives.

Contribution

It introduces an event-centric planning approach for legal summarization, combining content selection and structured event representations to produce more effective summaries.

Findings

Event-centric plans outperform entity-centric approaches in legal summarization.

Integrating content selection with event-based planning improves summary quality.

Experiments on four datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Abstract

Legal professionals often struggle with lengthy judgments and require efficient summarization for quick comprehension. To address this challenge, we investigate the need for structured planning in legal case summarization, particularly through event-centric representations that reflect the narrative nature of legal case documents. We propose our framework, CoPERLex, which operates in three stages: first, it performs content selection to identify crucial information from the judgment; second, the selected content is utilized to generate intermediate plans through event-centric representations modeled as Subject-Verb-Object tuples; and finally, it generates coherent summaries based on both the content and the structured plan. Our experiments on four legal summarization datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating content selection and planning components, highlighting the advantages of event-centric plans over traditional entity-centric approaches in the context of legal judgements.