{"paper":{"title":"Evaluating Customized vs. Generalist Transformer-based Models for Legal Contract Classification","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Aditya Joshi, Amrita Singh, H. Suhan Karaca, Hye-Young Paik, Jiaojiao Jiang","submitted_at":"2025-08-11T11:08:32Z","abstract_excerpt":"Despite advances in legal NLP, no comprehensive evaluation of Transformer-based models customized for legal tasks (referred to as `legal-specific' models in this paper) exists for contract classification tasks. To address this gap, we present an evaluation of 13 legal-specific transformer-based models on 3 English-language contract classification tasks and compare them with 9 generalist models. The results show that legal-specific models consistently outperform generalist models, especially on tasks requiring nuanced legal understanding. They also help reduce misclassification of rare classes "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2508.07849","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2508.07849/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}