A Multimodal Framework For Structuring Legal Documents

Document structuring plays a crucial role in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as information retrieval, and document understanding. It also helps readers to effectively navigate into a structured document with a large amount of textual data. In the legal domain, document structuring is particularly important for creating inter- and intra-document links. In this paper, we present a practical implementation of a multimodal workflow to structure legal documents across various formats. We create a format-agnostic representation of each document (PDF and HTML), that includes layout and textual information. We introduce a multimodal and sequential algorithm to detect titles in each document, and then establish hierarchical relationships among paragraphs using a deterministic algorithm. Our contribution extends to the publication of an open-source dataset, facilitating further exploration in this domain of study, which has received comparatively less attention.