Automatic text structuring and categorization as a first step in summarizing legal cases

摘要

The SALOMON system automatically summarizes Belgian criminal cases in order to improve access to the large number of existing and future court decisions. SALOMON extracts relevant text units from the case text to form a case summary. Such a case profile facilitates the rapid determination of the relevance of the case or may be employed in text search. In a first important abstracting step SALOMON performs an initial categorization of legal criminal cases and structures the case text into separate legally relevant and irrelevant components. A text grammar represented as a semantic network is used to automatically determine the category of the case and its components. In this way, we are able to extract from the case general data and to identify text portions relevant for further abstracting. It is argued that prior knowledge of the text structure and its indicative cues may support automatic abstracting. A text grammar is a promising form for representing the knowledge involved.