Passage retrieval in legal texts
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. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
passage retrieval legal texts contracts patents treaties