# Demystifying Legalese: An Automated Approach for Summarizing and Analyzing Overlaps in Privacy Policies and Terms of Service

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.13087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13087/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Troubling Trends in Machine Learning Scholarship](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03341/) (2018)
- [CLAUDETTE: an Automated Detector of Potentially Unfair Clauses in Online Terms of Service](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01217/) (2018)
- [Question Answering for Privacy Policies: Combining Computational and Legal Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00841/) (2019)
- [Polisis: Automated Analysis and Presentation of Privacy Policies Using Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02561/) (2018)
- [PolicyQA: A Reading Comprehension Dataset for Privacy Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02557/) (2020)
- [Privacy Policies over Time: Curation and Analysis of a Million-Document Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09159/) (2020)
- [Intent Classification and Slot Filling for Privacy Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00123/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The complexities of legalese in terms and policy documents can bind individuals to contracts they do not fully comprehend, potentially leading to uninformed data sharing. Our work seeks to alleviate this issue by developing language models that provide automated, accessible summaries and scores for such documents, aiming to enhance user understanding and facilitate informed decisions. We compared transformer-based and conventional models during training on our dataset, and RoBERTa performed better overall with a remarkable 0.74 F1-score. Leveraging our best-performing model, RoBERTa, we highlighted redundancies and potential guideline violations by identifying overlaps in GDPR-required documents, underscoring the necessity for stricter GDPR compliance.