NIT-Surat@L-Sum: A Semantic Retrieval-Based Framework for Summarizing Indian Judicial Documents

AbstractThe shared task of Legal Summarization (L-Summ) focuses on generating abstractive summaries for the Indian court judgments in English. This task presents unique challenges in producing fluent, relevant, and legally appropriate summaries given voluminous judgment texts. We experiment with different sequence-to-sequence models and present a comprehensive comparative study of their performance. We also evaluate various Large Language Models (LLM) with zero-shot settings for testing their summarization capabilities. Our best performing model is fine-tuned on a pre-trained legal summarization model where relevant passages are identified using the maximum marginal relevance(MMR) technique. Our findings highlight that retrieval-augmented fine-tuning is an effective approach for generating precise and concise legal summaries. We obtained a rank of 5th overall.