Cognitive Linguistic Representation of Legal Events: Towards a semantic-based legal information retrieval

摘要

An important role of an attorney in Brazil is to search Brazilian courts databases in order to find precedent decisions to base their requests on. This paper discusses the initial efforts that have been made towards the development of a legal knowledge base, composed by semantic frames, to improve Brazilian courts information retrieval systems. Linguistic methods are applied to recognize possible legal event structures to be described in legal documents. Afterwards, based on the linguistic theory of Frame Semantics, the participants and props of legal events are described. This is a work in progress that will involve both legal and linguistic description as well as system development. With this legal knowledge base, the results expected are the improvement of the legal information retrieval system of Brazilian courts databases, using semantic representation of Brazilian legal events.