# LexAbSumm: Aspect-based Summarization of Legal Decisions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00594 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00594/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Get To The Point: Summarization with Pointer-Generator Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04368/) (2017)
- [QMSum: A New Benchmark for Query-based Multi-domain Meeting Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05938/) (2021)
- [Newsroom: A Dataset of 1.3 Million Summaries with Diverse Extractive Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11283/) (2018)
- [SummaRuNNer: A Recurrent Neural Network based Sequence Model for Extractive Summarization of Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04230/) (2016)
- [LongT5: Efficient Text-To-Text Transformer for Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07916/) (2021)
- [Neural Legal Judgment Prediction in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02059/) (2019)
- [Unlimiformer: Long-Range Transformers with Unlimited Length Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01625/) (2023)
- [Paragraph-level Rationale Extraction through Regularization: A case study on European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13084/) (2021)
- [Summarizing Opinions: Aspect Extraction Meets Sentiment Prediction and They Are Both Weakly Supervised](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08858/) (2018)
- [Efficient Long-Text Understanding with Short-Text Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00748/) (2022)
- [WikiAsp: A Dataset for Multi-domain Aspect-based Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07832/) (2020)
- [SQuALITY: Building a Long-Document Summarization Dataset the Hard Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11465/) (2022)
- [Multi-LexSum: Real-World Summaries of Civil Rights Lawsuits at Multiple Granularities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10883/) (2022)
- [ASPECTNEWS: Aspect-Oriented Summarization of News Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08296/) (2021)
- [Mining Legal Arguments in Court Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06178/) (2022)
- [Bringing Structure into Summaries: a Faceted Summarization Dataset for Long Scientific Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00130/) (2021)
- [NEWTS: A Corpus for News Topic-Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15661/) (2022)
- [ArgLegalSumm: Improving Abstractive Summarization of Legal Documents with Argument Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01650/) (2022)
- [Deconfounding Legal Judgment Prediction for European Court of Human Rights Cases Towards Better Alignment with Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13836/) (2022)
- [OASum: Large-Scale Open Domain Aspect-based Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09233/) (2022)
- [Incorporating Domain Knowledge for Extractive Summarization of Legal Case Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15876/) (2021)
- [CDEvalSumm: An Empirical Study of Cross-Dataset Evaluation for Neural Summarization Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05139/) (2020)
- [Zero-shot Transfer of Article-aware Legal Outcome Classification for European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00609/) (2023)
- [From Dissonance to Insights: Dissecting Disagreements in Rationale Construction for Case Outcome Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11878/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Task Dependency and Contrastive Learning for Case Outcome Classification on European Court of Human Rights Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00768/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06357/) (2024)
- [LexSumm and LexT5: Benchmarking and Modeling Legal Summarization Tasks in English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09527/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Legal Summarization: Challenges and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17830/) (2025)
- [Unstructured Evidence Attribution for Long Context Query Focused Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14409/) (2025)
- [CoPERLex: Content Planning with Event-based Representations for Legal Case Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14112/) (2025)
- [Aspect-Based Summarization with Self-Aspect Retrieval Enhanced Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13054/) (2025)
- [LexGenie: Automated Generation of Structured Reports for European Court of Human Rights Case Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03266/) (2025)
- [Stress Testing Factual Consistency Metrics for Long-Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07689/) (2025)
- [RELexED: Retrieval-Enhanced Legal Summarization with Exemplar Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14113/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Legal professionals frequently encounter long legal judgments that hold critical insights for their work. While recent advances have led to automated summarization solutions for legal documents, they typically provide generic summaries, which may not meet the diverse information needs of users. To address this gap, we introduce LexAbSumm, a novel dataset designed for aspect-based summarization of legal case decisions, sourced from the European Court of Human Rights jurisdiction. We evaluate several abstractive summarization models tailored for longer documents on LexAbSumm, revealing a challenge in conditioning these models to produce aspect-specific summaries. We release LexAbSum to facilitate research in aspect-based summarization for legal domain.