Legal Text Summarization by Exploration of the Thematic Structure and Argumentative Roles

Abstract

In this paper we describe our method for the summarization of legal documents helping a legal expert determine the key ideas of a judgment. Our approach is based on the exploration of the document’s architecture and its thematic structures in order to build a table style summary for improving coherency and readability of the text. We present the components of a system, called LetSum, built with this approach, its implementation and some preliminary evaluation results.