BillSum: US Congressional and California State Bills for Summarization

BillSum contains between 10,000 and 100,000 records of US Congressional and California state legislative bills for text summarization. Published by FiscalNote in 2019, the dataset pairs full bill texts with their corresponding official summaries to support legal NLP research.

Use Cases

• Training abstractive summarization models using the text and summary columns
• Evaluating model performance on long-form legal documents using text_len
• Cross-referencing bill content with official title metadata

Strengths

• 10,000 to 100,000 records
• Expert-written summaries of complex legal text
• CC0 1.0 public domain license

Limitations

• Geographic bias restricted to US Federal and California state jurisdictions
• Feature inconsistency between federal and state subsets

Provenance

Source

FiscalNote and Arxiv paper 1910.00523

Collection Method

found

Freshness

Last updated March 2024; based on a 2019 research publication.

Geography

United States (Federal and California)