Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Ontology-based information extraction for juridical events with case studies in Brazilian legal realm

  • Published:
Artificial Intelligence and Law Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The number of available legal documents has presented an enormous growth in recent years, and the digital processing of such materials is prompting the necessity of systems that support the automatic relevant information extraction. This work presents a system for ontology-based information extraction from natural language texts, able to identify a set of legal events. The system is based on an innovative methodology based on domain ontology of legal events and a set of linguistic rules, integrated through inference mechanism, resulting in a flexible approach and scalable approach. A case study with the use of documents from the Superior Court in Brazil is related, with satisfactory results in precision and recall.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Amardeilh F, Laublet P, Minel J-L (2005) Document annotation and ontology population from linguistic extractions. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on knowledge capture. ACM, pp 161–168, Recuperado de http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1088651

  • Ashley K (2014) Applying argument extraction to improve legal information retrieval. In: ArgNLP, Recuperado de http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1341/paper3.pdf

  • Baader F, Horrocks I, Sattler U (2009) Description logics. In: Handbook on ontologies. Springer, pp 21–43. Recuperado de http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-92673-3_1

  • Berners-Lee T, Fielding R, Masinter L (2004) Uniform resource identifier (URI): generic syntax. Recuperado de http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3986

  • Bick E (2000) The parsing system“ Palavras”: automatic grammatical analysis of Portuguese in a constraint grammar framework. Aarhus Universitetsforlag, Aarhus

    Google Scholar 

  • Boella G, Di Caro L, Humphreys L, Robaldo L, Rossi P, van der Torre L (2016) Eunomos, a legal document and knowledge management system for the web to provide relevant, reliable and up-to-date information on the law. Artif Intell Law 24(3):245–283

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Breuker J (2004) Constructing a legal ontology: LRI-Core. In: Proceedings of WONTO-2004, workshop on ontologies and their applications. LivroRápido, Recife, Brazil

  • Brüninghaus S, Ashley KD (2001) Improving the representation of legal case texts with information extraction methods. In: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on artificial intelligence and law. ACM, pp 42–51. Recuperado de http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=383540

  • Chen S, Ye J-M (2016) A three layer semantic approach for information extraction. In: Materials, manufacturing technology, electronics and information science: proceedings of the 2015 international workshop on materials, manufacturing technology, electronics and information science (MMTEI2015). World Scientific, p 316. Recuperado de https://books.google.com.br/books?hl=pt-BR&lr=&id=XFa2DAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA316&dq=%22information+extraction%22++%22domain+ontology%22+linguistic&ots=ANMcXE50lD&sig=_6kk2-zMhdxpTGgSb7p5lVH1rok

  • Chiarcos C (2008) An ontology of linguistic annotations. In: LDV Forum. pp 1–16

  • Chiarcos C (2012a) Ontologies of linguistic annotation: survey and perspectives. In: LREC, pp 303–310. Recuperado de http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/~chiarcos/papers/chiarcos-2012-olia-lrec.pdf

  • Chiarcos C (2012b) POWLA: modeling linguistic corpora in OWL/DL. In: The semantic web: research and applications. Springer, pp 225–239. Recuperado de http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-30284-8_22

  • Chiarcos C (2012c) Interoperability of corpora and annotations. In: Linked data in linguistics. Springer, pp 161–179

  • Chiarcos C, Erjavec T (2011) OWL/DL formalization of the MULTEXT-East morphosyntactic specifications. In: Proceedings of the 5th linguistic annotation workshop. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp 11–20

  • Chiarcos C, Sukhareva M (2015) OLiA—ontologies of linguistic annotation. Semant Web 6(4):379–386

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • de Araujo DA, Müller C, Chishman R, Rigo SJ (2014) Information extraction for legal knowledge representation—a review of approaches and trends. Rev Bras Comput Apl 6(2):2–19

    Google Scholar 

  • Gutierrez F, Dou D, Fickas S, Wimalasuriya D, Zong H (2015) A hybrid ontology-based information extraction system. J Inf Sci 42(6):798–820. doi:10.1177/0165551515610989

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hafner CD (1978) An information retrieval system based on a computer model of legal knowledge. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

    Google Scholar 

  • Horridge M, Drummond N, Goodwin J, Rector AL, Stevens R, Wang H (2006) The Manchester OWL syntax. In: OWLED, vol 216. Recuperado de http://owl1-1.googlecode.com/svn-history/r716/trunk/www.webont.org/owled/2006/acceptedLong/submission_9.pdf

  • Jacobs PS (2014) Text-based intelligent systems: Current research and practice in information extraction and retrieval. Psychology Press, Recuperado de https://books.google.com.br/books?hl=pt-BR&lr=&id=7BDsAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=%22information+extraction%22+&ots=EqurvwC28l&sig=uAX5A8Fou8upPkgb8moVYOBpcKE

  • Jonsson P, Wuolikainen A, Thysell E, Chorell E, Stattin P, Wikström P, Antti H (2015) Constrained randomization and multivariate effect projections improve information extraction and biomarker pattern discovery in metabolomics studies involving dependent samples. Metabolomics 11(6):1667–1678

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jurafsky D, Martin JH (2000) Speech and language processing. Prentice-Hall, Inc: New Jersey

    Google Scholar 

  • König E, Lezius W (2000) The TIGER language—a description language for syntax graphs. Recuperado de http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.32.4134

  • Kowsrihawat K, Vateekul P (2015) An information extraction framework for legal documents: a case study of Thai Supreme Court verdicts. In: 12th international joint conference on computer science and software engineering (JCSSE), 2015. IEEE, pp 275–280. Recuperado de http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=7219809

  • Krız V, Hladká B (2015) RExtractor: a robust information extractor. In: Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, pp 21–25. Recuperado de http://www.anthology.aclweb.org/N/N15/N15-3.pdf#page=33

  • Labský M, Svátek V, Nekvasil M (2008) Information Extraction Based on Extraction Ontologies: Design, Deployment and Evaluation. ONTOLOGY-BASED INFORMATION EXTRACTION SYSTEMS (OBIES 2008), p 9

  • Laclavik M, Šeleng M, Ciglan M, Hluchỳ L (2012) Ontea: platform for pattern based automated semantic annotation. Comput Inform 28(4):555–579

    Google Scholar 

  • Lenci A, Montemagni S, Pirrelli V, Venturi G (2007) NLP-based ontology learning from legal texts. A case study. In: LOAIT. Citeseer, pp 113–129. Recuperado de http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.95.9650&rep=rep1&type=pdf#page=113

  • Lesmo L, Mazzei A, Palmirani M, Radicioni DP (2013) TULSI: an NLP system for extracting legal modificatory provisions. Artif Intell Law 21(2):139–172

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maarek M (2010) On the extraction of decisions and contributions from summaries of legal IT contract cases. In: LREC 2010 workshop on semantic processing of legal texts proceedings (SPLeT). Recuperado de https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00789652/

  • Mazzei A, Radicioni DP, Brighi R (2009) NLP-based extraction of modificatory provisions semantics. In: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on artificial intelligence and law. ACM, pp 50–57

  • McGuinness DL, Van Harmelen F (2004) OWL web ontology language overview. W3C recommendation 10(10):1–22

    Google Scholar 

  • Palmirani M, Ceci M, Radicioni D, Mazzei A (2011). FrameNet model of the suspension of norms. In: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on artificial intelligence and law, pp 189–193. ACM, Recuperado de http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2018385

  • Peters W, Sagri MT, Tiscornia D, Castagnoli S (2006) The LOIS project. In: Linguistic resources evaluation conference. Citeseer, Recuperado de http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.368.7292&rep=rep1&type=pdf

  • Sagri MT, TiscorniaD, Bertagna F (2004) Jur-WordNet. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international global Wordnet conference. Citeseer, pp 305–310. Recuperado de http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.111.8163&rep=rep1&type=pdf#page=317

  • Saravanan M, Ravindran B, Raman S (2009) Improving legal information retrieval using an ontological framework. Artif Intell Law 17(2):101–124

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schweighofer E, Liebwald D (2007) Advanced lexical ontologies and hybrid knowledge based systems: first steps to a dynamic legal electronic commentary. Artif Intell Law 15(2):103–115

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Soysal E, Cicekli I, Baykal N (2010) Design and evaluation of an ontology based information extraction system for radiological reports. Comput Biol Med 40(11):900–911

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ta CD, Thi TP (2015) Automatic evaluation of the computing domain ontology. In: International conference on future data and security engineering. Springer, pp 285–295 Recuperado de http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-26135-5_21

  • Varga A, Edmonds AN (2016) Multilingual extraction and editing of concept strings for the legal domain. Adv Comput Sci Int J 5(4):18–23

    Google Scholar 

  • Wang W, Stewart K (2015) Spatiotemporal and semantic information extraction from web news reports about natural hazards. Comput Environ Urban Syst 50:30–40

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wimalasuriya DC, Bandara L (2015) Development of an ontology construction component for the OBCIE (ontology-based components for information extraction) approach. Recuperado de http://www.saitm.edu.lk/fac_of_eng/RSEA/SAITM_RSEA_2013/imagenesweb/14.pdf

  • Wyner A, Peters W (2011) On rule extraction from regulations. In: JURIX. pp 113–122

  • Zhang J, El-Gohary N (2012) Extraction of construction regulatory requirements from textual documents using natural language processing techniques. In Computing in civil engineering. pp 453–460

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos (UNISINOS), São Leopoldo, Brazil

    Denis Andrei de Araujo, Sandro José Rigo & Jorge Luis Victória Barbosa

Authors
  1. Denis Andrei de Araujo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Sandro José Rigo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Jorge Luis Victória Barbosa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Denis Andrei de Araujo.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

de Araujo, D.A., Rigo, S.J. & Barbosa, J.L.V. Ontology-based information extraction for juridical events with case studies in Brazilian legal realm. Artif Intell Law 25, 379–396 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-017-9203-z

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-017-9203-z

Keywords

Search

Navigation