Abstract
For the rule of law to work well, citizens should know their rights and obligations, especially in a day to day context such as when posing as a consumers. Despite being available online, the Portuguese Consumer law was not accessible to the point of being able easy to insert a sentence written in natural language in a search engine and getting a clear response without first having to scroll through multiple little applicable search results. To solve this issue, we introduce Legal Semantic Search Engine (LeSSE), an information retrieval system that uses a hybrid approach of semantic and lexical information retrieval techniques. The new system performed better than the lexical search system in production.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by funds from Imprensa Nacional—Casa da Moeda (INCM) and from national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) through projects UIDB/50021/2020, UIDB/04326/2020, UIDP/04326/2020 and LA/P/0101/2020. We would also like to thank INCM and Direção Geral do Consumidor (DGC) for the expert support provided.
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Cordeiro, N.P., Dias, J., Santos, P.A. (2023). LeSSE—A Semantic Search Engine Applied to Portuguese Consumer Law. In: Moniz, N., Vale, Z., Cascalho, J., Silva, C., Sebastião, R. (eds) Progress in Artificial Intelligence. EPIA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49011-8_10
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