Passage retrieval in legal texts

Paolo Rosso (1) , Santiago Correa (1) , Davide Buscaldi (2)

1 Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación [Valencia]
2 LIFO - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale d'Orléans

Legal texts usually comprise many kinds of texts, such as contracts, patents and treaties. These texts usually include a huge quantity of unstructured information written in natural language. Thanks to automatic analysis and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques, it is possible to filter out information that is not relevant and, therefore, to reduce the amount of documents that users need to browse to find the information they are looking for. In this paper we adapted the JIRS passage retrieval system to work with three kinds of legal texts: treaties, patents and contracts, studying the issues related with the processing of this kind of information. In particular, we studied how a passage retrieval system might be linked up to automated analysis based on logic and algebraic programming for the detection of conflicts in contracts. In our set-up, a contract is translated into formal clauses, which are analysed by means of a model checking tool; then, the passage retrieval system is used to extract conflicting sentences from the original contract text.

Mots clés: Information Retrieval; Passage Retrieval; Legal Texts

Domaines: Traitement du texte et du document

Paolo Rosso, Santiago Correa, Davide Buscaldi. Passage retrieval in legal texts. Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming, 2011, 80 (3-5), pp.139-153. ⟨hal-00596890⟩