Improving Legal Entity Recognition Using a Hybrid Transformer Model and Semantic Filtering Approach

Legal Entity Recognition (LER) involves identifying key entities such as parties, dates, monetary amounts, and legal provisions from legal documents. Automating this process is crucial for improving efficiency in legal workflows, including contract review, compliance monitoring, and litigation support. Traditional Named Entity Recognition (NER) methods, such as rule-based systems and classical machine learning models like Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), require extensive feature engineering and struggle to adapt to new legal terminologies. Transformer-based models, particularly BERT [1], have shown great promise in various NLP tasks, including LER. **Legal-BERT**, a finetuned variant of BERT for legal texts, has demonstrated superior performance