BOE-XSUM: Extreme Summarization in Clear Language of Spanish Legal
  Decrees and Notifications
Authors: name: Andrés Fernández García; name: Javier de la Rosa; name: Julio Gonzalo; name: Roser Morante; name: Enrique Amigó; name: Alejandro Benito-Santos; name: Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz; name: Víctor Fresno; name: Adrian Ghajari; name: Guillermo Marco; name: Laura Plaza; name: Eva Sánchez Salido
Published: 2025-09-29 15:15:17

Abstract: The ability to summarize long documents succinctly is increasingly important
in daily life due to information overload, yet there is a notable lack of such
summaries for Spanish documents in general, and in the legal domain in
particular. In this work, we present BOE-XSUM, a curated dataset comprising
3,648 concise, plain-language summaries of documents sourced from Spain's
``Bolet\'{\i}n Oficial del Estado'' (BOE), the State Official Gazette. Each
entry in the dataset includes a short summary, the original text, and its
document type label. We evaluate the performance of medium-sized large language
models (LLMs) fine-tuned on BOE-XSUM, comparing them to general-purpose
generative models in a zero-shot setting. Results show that fine-tuned models
significantly outperform their non-specialized counterparts. Notably, the
best-performing model -- BERTIN GPT-J 6B (32-bit precision) -- achieves a 24\%
performance gain over the top zero-shot model, DeepSeek-R1 (accuracies of
41.6\% vs.\ 33.5\%).