LetSum, an automatic Legal Text Summarizing system

Abstract

This paper presents our work on the development of a new methodology for automatic summarization of justice decision. We describe LetSum (Legal text Sum- marizer), a prototype system, which determines the thematic structure of a judgment in four themes INTRODUCTION, CONTEXT, JURIDICAL ANALYSIS and CONCLUSION. Then it identifies the relevant sentences for each theme. We discuss the evaluation of produced summaries with statistical method and also human evaluation based on jurist judgment. The results so far indicate good performance of the system when compared with other summarization technologies.