Overview of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Empowering Justice
Abstract
AbstractThe first iteration of the JUST-NLP: Workshop on NLP for Empowering Justice was organized to accelerate research in Natural Language Processing for legal text processing. The inaugural edition, JUST-NLP 2025, was held as a hybrid event at IJCNLP-AACL 2025 on December 24 at IIT Bombay. The program featured a research track, four invited talks, and two shared tasks: (1) L-SUMM, an abstractive summarization task for Indian legal judgments, and (2) L-MT, a legal machine translation task between English and Hindi. The workshop received strong interest from the community, with 29 submissions, of which 21 were accepted. Among the accepted papers, 5 were regular research-track papers published in the proceedings, and 2 were accepted as non-archival presentations. For the shared tasks, 9 papers were accepted for L-SUMM, and 5 papers were accepted for L-MT, for publication in the proceedings. The workshop focused on a broad set of Legal NLP challenges, including information extraction, retrieval, multilingual processing, legal reasoning, and applications of large language models. Overall, JUST-NLP 2025 aimed to bring together AI researchers and legal practitioners to develop scalable, domain-aware NLP methods that can support legal workflows and contribute toward more efficient and equitable justice systems.