Contributions to legal document summarization: Judgments from the Portuguese Supreme Court of Justice

Abstract

Legal documents are commonly known for being lengthy and having a specific vocabulary. For professionals and non-jurists, having a summary of each document is crucial so they can use it as a reference for other cases without spending too much time reading the entire document. In the Portuguese Supreme Court of Justice, summaries are done manually, by its Judges which is very time-consuming because of the length of the legal documents. Aiming to support the Judges in this task, the goal of this work is to investigate how different techniques and methods of automated text summarization can achieve good performance on Portuguese legal documents.