Abstract

We propose a method for the annotation of Japanese civil judgment documents, with the purpose of creating flexible summaries of these. The first step, described in the current paper, concerns content selection, i.e., the question of which material should be extracted initially for the summary. In particular, we utilize the hierarchical argument structure of the judgment documents. Our main contributions are a) the design of an annotation scheme that stresses the connection between legal points (called issue topics) and argument structure, b) an adaptation of rhetorical status to suit the Japanese legal system and c) the definition of a linked argument structure based on legal sub-arguments. In this paper, we report agreement between two annotators on several aspects of the overall task.

Highlights

  • Automatic summarization has become increasingly crucial for dealing with the information overload in many aspects of life

  • Apart from the fact that the split allows us to recover the argument structure, we found that without the split, the argumentative text under FRAMING would cover too much text in our documents

  • We introduce a slightly unusual annotation procedure where annotators are asked to trace back the legal argument structure of the case

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Summary

Introduction

Automatic summarization has become increasingly crucial for dealing with the information overload in many aspects of life. This is no different in the legal arena, where lawyers and other legal practitioners are in danger of being overwhelmed by too many documents that are relevant to their specialized task. The situation is aggravated by the length and complexity of legal documents: for instance, the average sentence length in Japanese legal documents is 93.1 characters, as opposed to 47.5 characters in Japanese news text. It is not possible to read every document returned by a search engine. The final goal of our work is to provide automatic summaries that would enable the legal professions to make fast decisions about which documents they should read in detail

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