LexGLUE: A Benchmark Dataset for Legal Language Understanding in English.
Inspired by the recent widespread use of the GLUE multi-task benchmark NLP dataset (Wang et al., 2018), the subsequent more difficult SuperGLUE (Wang et al., 2019), other previous multi-task NLP benchmarks (Conneau and Kiela, 2018; McCann et al., 2018), and similar initiatives in other domains (Peng et al., 2019), we introduce the Legal General Language Understanding Evaluation (LexGLUE) benchmark, a benchmark dataset to evaluate the performance of NLP methods in legal tasks. LexGLUE is based on seven existing legal NLP datasets, selected using criteria largely from SuperGLUE.

As in GLUE and SuperGLUE (Wang et al., 2019b,a), one of our goals is to push towards generic (or ‘foundation’) models that can cope with multiple NLP tasks, in our case legal NLP tasks possibly with limited task-specific fine-tuning. Another goal is to provide a convenient and informative entry point for NLP researchers and practitioners wishing to explore or develop methods for legalNLP. Having these goals in mind, the datasets we include in LexGLUE and the tasks they address have been simplified in several ways to make it easier for newcomers and generic models to address all tasks.

LexGLUE benchmark is accompanied by experimental infrastructure that relies on Hugging Face Transformers library and resides at: https://github.com/coastalcph/lex-glue.