# Multi-granular Legal Topic Classification on Greek Legislation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.15298 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15298/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Caption Generation with Visual Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03044/) (2015)
- [Explainable Prediction of Medical Codes from Clinical Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05695/) (2018)
- [Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02059/) (2019)
- [CAIL2018: A Large-Scale Legal Dataset for Judgment Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02478/) (2018)
- [How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12158/) (2020)
- [HDLTex: Hierarchical Deep Learning for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.08267/) (2017)
- [Large-Scale Multi-Label Text Classification on EU Legislation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02192/) (2019)
- [AttentionXML: Label Tree-based Attention-Aware Deep Model for High-Performance Extreme Multi-Label Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01727/) (2018)
- [Bonsai -- Diverse and Shallow Trees for Extreme Multi-label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08249/) (2019)
- [Offensive Language Identification in Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07459/) (2020)
- [An Empirical Study on Large-Scale Multi-Label Text Classification Including Few and Zero-Shot Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01653/) (2020)
- [GREEK-BERT: The Greeks visiting Sesame Street](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12014/) (2020)
- [Interpretable Charge Predictions for Criminal Cases: Learning to Generate Court Views from Fact Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08504/) (2018)
- [Extreme Multi-Label Legal Text Classification: A case study in EU Legislation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10892/) (2019)
- [Obligation and Prohibition Extraction Using Hierarchical RNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03871/) (2018)
- [Layer-wise Guided Training for BERT: Learning Incrementally Refined Document Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05763/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [LEXTREME: A Multi-Lingual and Multi-Task Benchmark for the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13126/) (2023)
- [MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02069/) (2023)
- [Llama-Embed-Nemotron-8B: A Universal Text Embedding Model for Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07025/) (2025)
- [Natural Language Processing for the Legal Domain: A Survey of Tasks, Datasets, Models, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21306/) (2024)
- [Krikri: Advancing Open Large Language Models for Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13772/) (2025)
- [Bringing order into the realm of Transformer-based language models for artificial intelligence and law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05502/) (2023)
- [ChronosLex: Time-aware Incremental Training for Temporal Generalization of Legal Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14211/) (2024)
- [SwiLTra-Bench: The Swiss Legal Translation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01372/) (2025)
- [LawInstruct: A Resource for Studying Language Model Adaptation to the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02127/) (2024)
- [A Systematic Survey of Natural Language Processing for the Greek Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09861/) (2024)
- [Open or Closed LLM for Lesser-Resourced Languages? Lessons from Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12826/) (2025)
- [Forging GEMs: Advancing Greek NLP through Quality-Based Corpus Curation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20002/) (2025)
- [Data Processing for the OpenGPT-X Model Family](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08800/) (2024)
- [The Large Language Model GreekLegalRoBERTa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12852/) (2024)
- [MrBERT: Modern Multilingual Encoders via Vocabulary, Domain, and Dimensional Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21379/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we study the task of classifying legal texts written in the Greek language. We introduce and make publicly available a novel dataset based on Greek legislation, consisting of more than 47 thousand official, categorized Greek legislation resources. We experiment with this dataset and evaluate a battery of advanced methods and classifiers, ranging from traditional machine learning and RNN-based methods to state-of-the-art Transformer-based methods. We show that recurrent architectures with domain-specific word embeddings offer improved overall performance while being competitive even to transformer-based models. Finally, we show that cutting-edge multilingual and monolingual transformer-based models brawl on the top of the classifiers' ranking, making us question the necessity of training monolingual transfer learning models as a rule of thumb. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the task of Greek legal text classification is considered in an open research project, while also Greek is a language with very limited NLP resources in general.