Text summarization from legal documents: a survey

Abstract

Enormous amount of online information, available in legal domain, has made legal text processing an important area of research. In this paper, we attempt to survey different text summarization techniques that have taken place in the recent past. We put special emphasis on the issue of legal text summarization, as it is one of the most important areas in legal domain. We start with general introduction to text summarization, briefly touch the recent advances in single and multi-document summarization, and then delve into extraction based legal text summarization. We discuss different datasets and metrics used in summarization and compare performances of different approaches, first in general and then focused to legal text. we also mention highlights of different summarization techniques. We briefly cover a few software tools used in legal text summarization. We finally conclude with some future research directions.