A Survey on Challenges and Advances in Natural Language Processing with a Focus on Legal Informatics and Low-Resource Languages

Abstract

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has experienced significant growth in recent years, largely due to advancements in Deep Learning technology and especially Large Language Models. These improvements have allowed for the development of new models and architectures that have been successfully applied in various real-world applications. Despite this progress, the field of Legal Informatics has been slow to adopt these techniques. In this study, we conducted an extensive literature review of NLP research focused on legislative documents. We present the current state-of-the-art NLP tasks related to Law Consolidation, highlighting the challenges that arise in low-resource languages. Our goal is to outline the difficulties faced by this field and the methods that have been developed to overcome them. Finally, we provide examples of NLP implementations in the legal domain and discuss potential future directions.