A Legal Information System for Intelligent Sentence Mining Applied to Civil Law

Manual search and evaluation of relevant information in legal documents usually are slow, repetitive, and liable to error. On the other hand, intelligent tools for text mining have been successfully employed in different areas such as Law. The interpretation and extraction of information from lawsuits are non-trivial. Even if more experienced lawyers, when analyzing each case individually, can indicate the most likely results and the best-associated strategies, there is no clear methodology for achieving this analysis. We describe in this study the Intelligent Sentence Mining (MIS) tool, an information system for prospecting and automatic extraction of information in Brazilian civil sentences, such as decision, name of the judge, sentence value, and obligations to do. The proposed system was conceived based on a hybrid architecture addressing ontologies and machine learning strategies. Regarding data prospecting from civil proceedings, it was observed from the analysis presenting an accuracy between 86% and 96% (in general) when extracting the judges name, values, and decision from the sentence.