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Extracting Definitions from Brazilian Legal Texts

  • Conference paper
Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2012 (ICCSA 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7335))

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Abstract

In order to avoid ambiguity and to ensure, as far as possible, a strict interpretation of law, legal texts usually define the specific lexical terms used within their discourse by means of normative rules. With an often large amount of rules in effect in a given domain, extracting these definitions manually would be a costly undertaking. This paper presents an approach to cope with this problem based in a variation of an automated technique of natural language processing of Brazilian Portuguese texts. For the sake of generality, the proposed solution was developed to address the more general problem of building a glossary from domain specific texts that contain definitions amongst their content. This solution was applied to a corpus of texts on the telecommunications regulations domain and the results are reported. The usual pipeline of natural language processing has been followed: preprocessing, segmentation, and part-of-speech tagging. A set of feature extraction functions is specified and used along with reference glossary information on whether or not a text fragment is a definition, to train a SVM classifier. At last, the definitions are extracted from the texts and evaluated upon a testing corpus, which also contains the reference glossary annotations on definitions. The results are then discussed in light of other definition extraction techniques.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate Program on Knowledge and IT Management, Catholic University of Brasilia, SGAN 916 Av. W5, 70790-160, Brasília, DF, Brazil

    Edilson Ferneda, Hércules Antonio do Prado & Augusto Herrmann Batista

  2. Embrapa - Management and Strategy Secretariat, Parque Estação Biológica - PqEB s/n°, 70770-90, Brasília, DF, Brazil

    Hércules Antonio do Prado

  3. Logistics and Information Technology Secretariat, Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management, Esplanada dos Ministérios - Bloco C, 70046-900, Brasília, DF, Brazil

    Augusto Herrmann Batista

  4. COPPE, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Marcello Sandi Pinheiro

  5. Centro de Tecnologia, Cidade Universitária, Bloco B, sala 101 - Ilha do Fundão, 68506, 21941-972, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Marcello Sandi Pinheiro

Authors
  1. Edilson Ferneda
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  2. Hércules Antonio do Prado
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  3. Augusto Herrmann Batista
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  4. Marcello Sandi Pinheiro
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Urban and Territorial Systems, University of Basilicata, 10, Viale dell’Ateneo Lucano, 85100, Potenza, Italy

    Beniamino Murgante

  2. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Perugia, Via Vanvitelli 1, 06123, Perugia, Italy

    Osvaldo Gervasi

  3. Department of Cyber Security Science, Federal University of Technology, Gidan Kwano Campus, Minna, Nigeria

    Sanjay Misra

  4. Faculty of Engineering, Department of Electronics Engineering and Telecommunications, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Rua Sao Francisco Xavier, 524, 50. andar, sala 5145-F, Maracana, 20.550-013, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil

    Nadia Nedjah

  5. Department of Production and Systems, University of Minho, Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057, Braga, Portugal

    Ana Maria A. C. Rocha

  6. School of Business Systems, Monash University, 3800, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    David Taniar

  7. Department of Intelligent Informatics, Kyushu Sangyo University, 2-3-1 Matsukadai, Higashi-ku, 813-8503, Fukuoka, Japan

    Bernady O. Apduhan

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Ferneda, E., do Prado, H.A., Batista, A.H., Pinheiro, M.S. (2012). Extracting Definitions from Brazilian Legal Texts. In: Murgante, B., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2012. ICCSA 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7335. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31137-6_48

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31137-6_48

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31136-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31137-6

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