*Master degree internship offer in Nantes@France, NLP team*

*Title:
"Generating rhetorically coherent summaries of long legal documents"*

*General information*

-   Location: Nantes University, Laboratory of Digital Sciences of
    Nantes, Natural Language Processing Team [1]
-   Gratification : ~600 euros
-   Starting date: Jan-2024 (flexible) ~6 months
-   Supervisors: Laura Monceaux, Anas Belfathi and Nicolas Hernandez

Subject in brief

As the highest court in the United States, dealing with constitutional
issues and federal law, the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) defines a model of
society whose global impact extends beyond the borders of the United
States. It is crucial that international legal practitioners who do not
speak American as their first language are able to access and understand
these decisions.

The ANR Lexhnology project [2] proposes to exploit the rhetorical
structure of the texts to facilitate access to them. In this internship,
we propose to work on the summarisation task. The scientific questions
in summarization concern the efficient modelling of long documents, the
exploitation of Large Language Models for the extraction of important
parts and the generation of summaries, and the evaluation of the
productions generated.

The internship will focus on studying the use of rhetorical analyses in
the process of extracting relevant text parts and generating coherent
summaries. Depending on the candidate's development and affinities, the
following aspects can be explored: Measuring the impact of segmentation
strategies, analysing the impact of the complexity of a case, taking
into account multiple modalities (oral argument and written opinion),
considering the criteria for evaluating the summaries generated.

See an extended version of the offer [3].

[1] http://taln.ls2n.fr
[2] https://lexhnology.hypotheses.org/
[3] https://www.ls2n.fr/stage-these/generating-rhetorically-coherent-summaries-of-long-legal-documents


*Application*

To apply for this position, please send an email with your Curriculum
Vitae, a document with your academic results, and a few words
explaining your interest in this project to Laura Monceaux AND
Anas Belfathi AND Nicolas Hernandez (firstname.lastname@univ-nantes.fr).

We are looking for applications from students preparing a Master's
degree or equivalent with solid skills (and ideally experience) in
Natural  Language Processing, Machine Learning and Deep Learning.
Excellent verbal and written skills (in English) are also essential.