README.md

---
license: cc-by-sa-4.0
dataset_info:
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  data_files:
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---

# ZASCA-Sum: South African Supreme Court of Appeal Summarization Dataset

**ZASCA-Sum** is a curated dataset comprising over 4,000 judgments from the South African Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), each paired with corresponding media summaries. This dataset is designed to facilitate research in legal natural language processing (NLP), particularly in the areas of legal summarization, information retrieval, and the development of legal language models tailored to South African jurisprudence.

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## Dataset Overview

- **Total Entries**: 4,000+ judgment-summary pairs
- **Languages**: English (South African legal context)
- **Structure**:
  - `judgment_text`: Full text of the SCA judgment
  - `media_summary`: Corresponding media summary of the judgment
  - `case_id`: Unique identifier for each case
  - `date`: Date of the judgment
  - `url`: Link to the official judgment document

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## Usage

This dataset is intended for:

- Training and evaluating legal summarization models
- Developing legal information retrieval systems
- Conducting research in legal NLP and computational law
- Enhancing access to legal information and promoting transparency in the judicial system

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## Accessing the Dataset

The dataset is available on Hugging Face:

👉 [https://huggingface.co/datasets/dsfsi/zasca-sum](https://huggingface.co/datasets/dsfsi/zasca-sum)

To load the dataset using the Hugging Face `datasets` library:


```python
from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset("dsfsi/zasca-sum")
```


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## Citation

If you use ZASCA-Sum in your research, please cite the following publication:


```bibtex
@article{abdulmumin2025zasca,
  title={ZASCA-Sum: A Dataset of the South Africa Supreme Courts of Appeal Judgments and Media Summaries},
  author={Abdulmumin, Idris and Marivate, Vukosi},
  journal={Data in Brief},
  volume={47},
  pages={111567},
  year={2025},
  publisher={Elsevier},
  doi={10.1016/j.dib.2025.111567}
}
```


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## License

This dataset is released under the [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) license.


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For more information, please refer to the [associated publication](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2025.111567).

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