Sentence-Level Rhetorical Role Labeling in Judicial Decisions

Csányi, Gergely and Üveges, István and Lakatos, Dorina and Ripszám, Dóra and Kozák, Kornélia and Nagy, Dániel and Vadász, János Pál (2025) Sentence-Level Rhetorical Role Labeling in Judicial Decisions. BIG DATA AND COGNITIVE COMPUTING, 9 (12). No. 315. ISSN 2504-2289

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Abstract

This paper presents an in-production Rhetorical Role Labeling (RRL) classifier developed for Hungarian judicial decisions. RRL is a sequential classification problem in Natural Language Processing, aiming to assign functional roles (such as facts, arguments, decision, etc.) to every segment or sentence in a legal document. The study was conducted on a human-annotated sentence-level RRL corpus and compares multiple neural architectures, including BiLSTM, attention-based networks, and a support vector machine as baseline. It further investigates the impact of late chunking during vectorization, in contrast to classical approaches. Results from tests on the labeled dataset and annotator agreement statistics are reported, and performance is analyzed across architecture types and embedding strategies. Contrary to recent findings in retrieval tasks, late chunking does not show consistent improvements for sentence-level RRL, suggesting that contextualization through chunk embeddings may introduce noise rather than useful context in Hungarian legal judgments. The work also discusses the unique structure and labeling challenges of Hungarian cases compared to international datasets and provides empirical insights for future legal NLP research in non-English court decisions.

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