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Using Topic Modeling in Classification of Brazilian Lawsuits

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Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (PROPOR 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13208))

Abstract

Legal text processing is a challenging task for modeling approaches due to the peculiarities inherent to its features, such as long texts and their technical vocabulary. Topic modeling consists of discovering a semantic structure in the text. This paper investigates the application of topic modeling and the use of information about the legislation cited in identifying the subject of legal documents and evaluating its applicability in the classification of Brazilian lawsuits. The models were trained with a Golden Collection of 16 thousand initial petitions and indictments from the Court of Justice of the State of Ceará, in Brazil, whose lawsuits were classified in the five more representative National Council of Justice (CNJ) of Brazil classes - Common Civil Procedure, Execution of Extrajudicial Title, Criminal Action - Ordinary Procedure, Special Civil Court Procedure, and Tax Enforcement. The results obtained outperform the baseline, achieving 0.89 of F1 score (macro). Our interpretation is that the representation of the document through contextual embeddings generated by BERT, as well as the architecture of the model with bidirectional contexts, makes it possible to capture the specific context of the domain of legal documents. Thus, the use of the legislation mentioned in the representation of documents can improve the accuracy of the classification task.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.cnj.jus.br/sgt/consulta_publica_classes.php.

  2. 2.

    The lemmatization process and PoS tagging were based on what is available in the spaCy library for Portuguese language (https://spacy.io/).

  3. 3.

    https://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/latest/python/python_api.html.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Brazil

    André Aguiar, Vasco Furtado, Vládia Pinheiro & João A. Monteiro Neto

  2. Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Ceará, Fortaleza, Brazil

    Raquel Silveira

  3. ETICE - Information Technology Company of Ceará, Fortaleza, Brazil

    Vasco Furtado

Authors
  1. André Aguiar
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  2. Raquel Silveira
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  3. Vasco Furtado
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  4. Vládia Pinheiro
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  5. João A. Monteiro Neto
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to André Aguiar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade de Fortaleza, Fortaleza, Brazil

    Vládia Pinheiro

  2. CiTIUS - Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Pablo Gamallo

  3. Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Raquel Amaro

  4. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Carolina Scarton

  5. INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal

    Fernando Batista

  6. Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil

    Diego Silva

  7. University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Catarina Magro

  8. Sentimonitor, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Hugo Pinto

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Aguiar, A., Silveira, R., Furtado, V., Pinheiro, V., Neto, J.A.M. (2022). Using Topic Modeling in Classification of Brazilian Lawsuits. In: Pinheiro, V., et al. Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13208. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98305-5_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98305-5_22

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-98304-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-98305-5

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