LRL_NC at SemEval-2023 Task 6: Sequential Sentence Classification for Legal Documents Using Topic Modeling Features

AbstractNatural Language Processing techniques can be leveraged to process legal proceedings for various downstream applications, such as sum- marization of a given judgement, prediction of the judgement for a given legal case, prece- dent search, among others. These applications will benefit from legal judgement documents already segmented into topically coherent units. The current task, namely, Rhetorical Role Pre- diction, aims at categorising each sentence in the sequence of sentences in a judgement document into different labels. The system proposed in this work combines topic mod- eling and RoBERTa to encode sentences in each document. A BiLSTM layer has been utilised to get contextualised sentence repre- sentations. The Rhetorical Role predictions for each sentence in each document are gen- erated by a final CRF layer of the proposed neuro-computing system. This system secured the rank 12 in the official task ranking, achiev- ing the micro-F1 score 0.7980. The code for the proposed systems has been made available at https://github.com/KushagriT/SemEval23_ LegalEval_TeamLRL_NC