Arabic Legal Text Classification Using Pre-Trained Transformers and Deep Learning

Natural language processing (NLP) techniques have evolved substantially in recent years, with transformer-based architectures emerging as powerful tools for textual analysis across various fields. This paper investigates the underexplored area of Arabic legal text classification through the implementation of transformer-based language models integrated with deep learning (DL) architectures. Even though transformer models are widely used in legal NLP for high-resource languages, their application to Arabic legal texts remains limited due to linguistic complexities and dataset scarcity. We introduce a classification model for Arabic legal text and present a new dataset of over 27,000 Moroccan legal cases with seven categories. Our methodology implements a segment-based approach to overcome the token limitations of transformer models, processing document segments individually before aggregating embeddings to create complete document representations. Four deep learning architectures are then used to classify those documents. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that MARBERTv2 combined with Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) architecture achieves superior performance with 95.01% accuracy and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.9090.