mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Comprehensive Survey on Legal Summarization: Challenges and Future Directions

arXiv 2501.17830 ↗First posted 29 Jan 2025cs.CLcited by 6

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

This article provides a systematic up-to-date survey of automatic summarization techniques, datasets, models, and evaluation methods in the legal domain. Through specific source selection criteria, we thoroughly review over 120 papers spanning the modern `transformer' era of natural language processing (NLP), thus filling a gap in existing systematic surveys on the matter. We present existing research along several axes and discuss trends, challenges, and opportunities for future research.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 55 of its 149 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jan 2025.

Builds on

55 of 149 references.

References · 55

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
  3. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,874
  4. 2019BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTcited by 5,462
  5. 2020Longformer: The Long-Document Transformercited by 3,362
  6. 2019PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarizationcited by 1,100
  7. 2020On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarizationcited by 895
  8. 2021BARTScore: Evaluating Generated Text as Text Generationcited by 719
  9. 2019Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generationcited by 668
  10. 2020SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluationcited by 666
  11. 2019Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Abstractive Text Summarizationcited by 578
  12. 2021SummaC: Re-Visiting NLI-based Models for Inconsistency Detection in Summarizationcited by 402
38 more
  1. 2015A Neural Attention Model for Abstractive Sentence Summarizationcited by 394
  2. 2023NLP Evaluation in trouble: On the Need to Measure LLM Data Contamination for each Benchmarkcited by 339
  3. 2019Neural Text Summarization: A Critical Evaluationcited by 189
  4. 2020A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarioscited by 170
  5. 2024Hallucination-Free? Assessing the Reliability of Leading AI Legal Research Toolscited by 170
  6. 2024Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Modelscited by 144
  7. 2019BillSum: A Corpus for Automatic Summarization of US Legislationcited by 117
  8. 2016Neural Summarization by Extracting Sentences and Wordscited by 114
  9. 2023MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpuscited by 59
  10. 2022Multi-LexSum: Real-World Summaries of Civil Rights Lawsuits at Multiple Granularitiescited by 47
  11. 2023How Ready are Pre-trained Abstractive Models and LLMs for Legal Case Judgement Summarization?cited by 43
  12. 2024Natural Language Processing for the Legal Domain: A Survey of Tasks, Datasets, Models, and Challengescited by 42
  13. 2022Pre-trained Language Models for the Legal Domain: A Case Study on Indian Lawcited by 39
  14. 2022EUR-Lex-Sum: A Multi- and Cross-lingual Dataset for Long-form Summarization in the Legal Domaincited by 39
  15. 2019Plain English Summarization of Contractscited by 28
  16. 2020Privacy Policies over Time: Curation and Analysis of a Million-Document Datasetcited by 28
  17. 2022Corpus for Automatic Structuring of Legal Documentscited by 25
  18. 2022ArgLegalSumm: Improving Abstractive Summarization of Legal Documents with Argument Miningcited by 25
  19. 2021Long Document Summarization in a Low Resource Setting using Pretrained Language Modelscited by 24
  20. 2021Incorporating Domain Knowledge for Extractive Summarization of Legal Case Documentscited by 23
  21. 2022Legal Case Document Summarization: Extractive and Abstractive Methods and their Evaluationcited by 23
  22. 2024Applicability of Large Language Models and Generative Models for Legal Case Judgement Summarizationcited by 23
  23. 2020Reducing Quantity Hallucinations in Abstractive Summarizationcited by 22
  24. 2024Generative AI in EU Law: Liability, Privacy, Intellectual Property, and Cybersecuritycited by 21
  25. 2019Hybrid Recommender Systems: A Systematic Literature Reviewcited by 16
  26. 2024Low-Resource Court Judgment Summarization for Common Law Systemscited by 11
  27. 2021Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning for Extractive Legal Summarizationcited by 10
  28. 2022An Evaluation Framework for Legal Document Summarizationcited by 10
  29. 2023MILDSum: A Novel Benchmark Dataset for Multilingual Summarization of Indian Legal Case Judgmentscited by 10
  30. 2023Legal Extractive Summarization of U.S. Court Opinionscited by 9
  31. 2023Towards Argument-Aware Abstractive Summarization of Long Legal Opinions with Summary Rerankingcited by 9
  32. 2024LexAbSumm: Aspect-based Summarization of Legal Decisionscited by 9
  33. 2022Computing and Exploiting Document Structure to Improve Unsupervised Extractive Summarization of Legal Case Decisionscited by 8
  34. 2018Multi-Task Deep Learning for Legal Document Translation, Summarization and Multi-Label Classificationcited by 6
  35. 2021LawSum: A weakly supervised approach for Indian Legal Document Summarizationcited by 6
  36. 2023Encoded Summarization: Summarizing Documents into Continuous Vector Space for Legal Case Retrievalcited by 6
  37. 2022What to Read in a Contract? Party-Specific Summarization of Legal Obligations, Entitlements, and Prohibitionscited by 5
  38. 2023Question-Answering Approach to Evaluating Legal Summariescited by 5

50 most cited of 55 All 55 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 4; 2026: 2.

6 papers.

  1. 2025Modeling Motivated Reasoning in Law: Evaluating Strategic Role Conditioning in LLM Summarizationcited by 3
  2. 2025Judging by Appearances? Auditing and Intervening Vision-Language Models for Bail Predictioncited by 0
  3. 2025AugAbEx: Bridging Abstractive and Extractive Legal Summarizationcited by 0
  4. 2025CourtPressGER: A German Court Decision to Press Release Summarization Datasetcited by 0
  5. 2026LLM-ReSum: A Framework for LLM Reflective Summarization through Self-Evaluationcited by 0
  6. 2026Reexamining zero-shot summarization: Empirical investigation of trustworthiness of LLM-summarizerscited by 0