In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially. There is a need for developing techniques for processing and organizing legal documents. In this paper, we introduce a new corpus for structuring legal documents. In particular, we introduce a corpus of legal judgment documents in English that are segmented into topical and coherent parts. Each of these parts is annotated with a label coming from a list of pre-defined Rhetorical Roles. We develop baseline models for automatically predicting rhetorical roles in a legal document based on the annotated corpus. Further, we show the application of rhetorical roles to improve performance on the tasks of summarization and legal judgment prediction. We release the corpus and baseline model code along with the paper.

翻译：在人口众多的国家,待决法律案件呈指数增长趋势,需要开发处理和组织法律文件的技术,在本文件中,我们引入了法律文件结构的新体系,特别是我们引入了一整套英文法律判决文件,分为专题和连贯部分,每个部分都有附加说明,标签来自预先界定的 " 体力作用 " 清单,我们开发了基线模型,用以自动预测根据附加说明材料在法律文件中的口头作用。此外,我们展示了运用口头作用来改进总结和法律判断预测任务的业绩,我们发布了《体力和基线示范守则》和文件。