MILDSum: A Novel Benchmark Dataset for Multilingual Summarization of
  Indian Legal Case Judgments
Debtanu Datta Shubham Soni Rajdeep Mukherjee Saptarshi Ghosh
Automatic summarization of legal case judgments is a practically important
problem that has attracted substantial research efforts in many countries. In
the context of the Indian judiciary, there is an additional complexity --
Indian legal case judgments are mostly written in complex English, but a
significant portion of India's population lacks command of the English
language. Hence, it is crucial to summarize the legal documents in Indian
languages to ensure equitable access to justice. While prior research primarily
focuses on summarizing legal case judgments in their source languages, this
study presents a pioneering effort toward cross-lingual summarization of
English legal documents into Hindi, the most frequently spoken Indian language.
We construct the first high-quality legal corpus comprising of 3,122 case
judgments from prominent Indian courts in English, along with their summaries
in both English and Hindi, drafted by legal practitioners. We benchmark the
performance of several diverse summarization approaches on our corpus and
demonstrate the need for further research in cross-lingual summarization in the
legal domain.