Summarization of legal documents: Where are we now and the way forward

Abstract

Due to huge amount of legal information availability on the internet, as well as other sources, it is important for the research community to do more extensive research on the area of legal text processing, which can help us make sense out of the vast amount of available data. This information growth has compelled the requirement to develop systems that can help legal professionals as well as ordinary citizens get relevant legal information with very little effort. In this survey paper, different text summarization techniques are surveyed, with a specific focus on legal document summarization, as this is one of the most important areas in the legal field, which can help with the quick understanding of legal documents. This paper starts with the general introduction to text summarization, following which various legal text summarization techniques are discussed. Various available tools are also described in this paper which is used for summarization of legal text. Two case studies are also presented in this work, where the automatic summarization of heterogeneous legal documents from two countries is considered. With the presented detailed review of the state of the art approaches, comparative analysis from the case studies and also discussions on several important research questions, this work is expected to provide a good starting point for researchers to perform a more in-depth exploration of the area of legal document summarization, more specifically with respect to the key future research directions identified in this work.