In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially.
There is a need for developing NLP-based techniques for processing and
automatically understanding legal documents. To promote research in the area of
Legal NLP we organized the shared task LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts at
SemEval 2023. LegalEval task has three sub-tasks: Task-A (Rhetorical Roles
Labeling) is about automatically structuring legal documents into semantically
coherent units, Task-B (Legal Named Entity Recognition) deals with identifying
relevant entities in a legal document and Task-C (Court Judgement Prediction
with Explanation) explores the possibility of automatically predicting the
outcome of a legal case along with providing an explanation for the prediction.
In total 26 teams (approx. 100 participants spread across the world) submitted
systems paper. In each of the sub-tasks, the proposed systems outperformed the
baselines; however, there is a lot of scope for improvement. This paper
describes the tasks, and analyzes techniques proposed by various teams.Comment: 13 Pages (9 Pages + References), Accepted at SemEval 202