Legal texts, characterized by complex and specialized terminology, present a significant challenge for Language Models. Adding an underrepresented language, such as Spanish, to the mix makes it even more challenging. While pre-trained models like XLM-RoBERTa have shown capabilities in handling multilingual corpora, their performance on domain specific documents remains underexplored. This paper presents the development and evaluation of MEL, a legal language model based on XLM-RoBERTa-large, fine-tuned on legal documents such as BOE (Bolet\'in Oficial del Estado, the Spanish oficial report of laws) and congress texts. We detail the data collection, processing, training, and evaluation processes. Evaluation benchmarks show a significant improvement over baseline models in understanding the legal Spanish language. We also present case studies demonstrating the model's application to new legal texts, highlighting its potential to perform top results over different NLP tasks.
@article{arxiv.2501.16011,
title = {MEL: Legal Spanish Language Model},
author = {David Betancur Sánchez and Nuria Aldama García and Álvaro Barbero Jiménez and Marta Guerrero Nieto and Patricia Marsà Morales and Nicolás Serrano Salas and Carlos García Hernán and Pablo Haya Coll and Elena Montiel Ponsoda and Pablo Calleja Ibáñez},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.16011},
year = {2025}
}