2019 PlainEnglishSummarizationofCont
- (Manor & Li, 2019) ⇒ Laura Manor, and Junyi Jessy Li. (2019). “Plain English Summarization of Contracts.” In: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop (NLLP). doi:10.48550/arXiv.1906.00424
Subject Headings: Contract Sumamrization Algorithm, Contract Summarization Evaluation.
Notes
- It proposes the task of summarizing legal documents like terms of service in simple language
- It created a dataset of 446 examples of legal text and plain English summaries
- It showed the summaries use simpler language and abstract key ideas
- It tested standard summarization techniques that didn't perform well on the dataset, including:
- TextRank, which selects sentences based on graph-based ranking
- KL-Sum, which greedily selects sentences to minimize divergence from the original text
- a Lead baselines summarization method, which take the first 1-3 sentences as the summary
- a Random-K summarization methodes, which randomly selects sentences for the summary
- It calls for more research into unsupervised simplification and style transfer techniques
Cited By
Quotes
Abstract
Unilateral legal contracts, such as terms of service, play a substantial role in modern digital life. However, few read these documents before accepting the terms within, as they are too long and the language too complicated. We propose the task of summarizing such legal documents in plain English, which would enable users to have a better understanding of the terms they are accepting. We propose an initial dataset of legal text snippets paired with summaries written in plain English. We verify the quality of these summaries manually, and show that they involve heavy abstraction, compression, and simplification. Initial experiments show that unsupervised extractive summarization methods do not perform well on this task due to the level of abstraction and style differences. We conclude with a call for resource and technique development for simplification and style transfer for legal language.
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 PlainEnglishSummarizationofCont | Junyi Jessy Li Laura Manor | Plain English Summarization of Contracts | 10.48550/arXiv.1906.00424 | 2019 |