The AIS Project: Boosting Information Extraction from Legal
Documents by using Ontologies
Mar
´
ıa G. Buey
1
, Angel Luis Garrido
2
, Carlos Bobed
2
and Sergio Ilarri
2
1
InSynergy Consulting S.A., Madrid, Spain
2
IIS Department, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
Keywords:
Information Extraction, Ontologies, Legal Documents.
Abstract:
In the legal field, it is a fact that a large number of documents are processed every day by management
companies with the purpose of extracting data that they consider most relevant in order to be stored in their
own databases. Despite technological advances, in many organizations, the task of examining these usually-
extensive documents for extracting just a few essential data is still performed manually by people, which is
expensive, time-consuming, and subject to human errors. Moreover, legal documents usually follow several
conventions in both structure and use of language, which, while not completely formal, can be exploited to
boost information extraction. In this work, we present an approach to obtain relevant information out from
these legal documents based on the use of ontologies to capture and take advantage of such structure and
language conventions. We have implemented our approach in a framework that allows to address different
types of documents with minimal effort. Within this framework, we have also regarded one frequent problem
that is found in this kind of documentation: the presence of overlapping elements, such as stamps or signatures,
which greatly hinders the extraction work over scanned documents. Experimental results show promising
results, showing the feasibility of our approach.
1 INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, in many organizations, the process of
identifying data from legal documents is still per-
formed manually by people who handle them. These
documents are usually quite extensive, and the most
important data to be identified are often few. The per-
son who is responsible for doing this process devotes
considerable time to read and to identify these data,
time that she/he could be spending on other more im-
portant tasks. Therefore, it would be very useful to
provide an automatic tool to perform this data extrac-
tion, helping to make the handling of the process of
legal documents more agile.
Legal documents follow several conventions in
both structure and use of language, which, despite not
being completely formal, can be exploited to improve
information extraction. Moreover, this kind of docu-
ments contains in many cases a considerable amount
of overlapping elements like stamps and signatures.
These elements are usually required to prove the au-
thenticity of the document, so they are hardly avoid-
able. Thus, all the legal documents in this context are
digitalized with these marks, which can greatly ham-
per the process of extracting information from them.
In this paper, we propose an approach for the de-
velopment of tools to extract specific data from exten-
sive legal documents in text format. The data extrac-
tion process is guided by the information stored into
a special type of ontology that contains the knowl-
edge about the structure of the different types of doc-
uments, as well as references to pertinent extracting
mechanisms. In this context, we have searched for
solutions in order to improve the recall and the pre-
cision of the software by minimizing the presence of
annoying overlapping elements in the document. Fi-
nally, we present an implementation of our approach,
the AIS
1
system, which has been integrated within
the commercial Content Relationship Management
(CRM) solution of InSynergy Consulting
2
, a well-
known IT company. Despite the fact that experimen-
tal dataset is composed of Spanish legal documents,
our approximation is generic enough to be applied to
documents in other languages.
1
AIS stands for An
´
alisis e Interpretaci
´
on Sem
´
antica
which translates into Analysis and Semantic Interpretation
2
http://www.isyc.com
438
Buey, M., Garrido, A., Bobed, C. and Ilarri, S.
The AIS Project: Boosting Information Extraction from Legal Documents by using Ontologies.
DOI: 10.5220/0005757204380445
In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2016) - Volume 2, pages 438-445
ISBN: 978-989-758-172-4
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 de-
scribes the analysis of the structure and the content of
the legal documents studied in this work. Section 3
explains the methodology proposed for the data ex-
traction process. Section 4 discusses the preliminary
results of our first experiments with real documents.
Section 5 analyzes and describes the state of the art.
Finally, Section 6 provides our conclusions and future
work.
2 WORKING CONTEXT
In this work, we deal with certain types of legal docu-
ments: notarial acts, judicial acts, registry documents,
and private documents (Child, 1992). These docu-
ments are required to perform different formalities
and, therefore, the type of data that is necessary to
extract from them varies. Furthermore, while being
well categorized, their content structure is quite het-
erogeneous, ranging from very well structured doc-
uments (e.g., notarial acts) to almost free text docu-
ments (e.g., private agreements between individuals).
To study the typology of these legal documents,
we have applied the research lines of discourse analy-
sis exposed in (Moens et al., 1999), and we have clas-
sified legal documents into different types. We as-
sume that each of these types of legal documents has
an associated set of attributes and information about
the minimum data required to be found within them.
For example, the data to be extracted from a particular
type of document might be its title, its protocol num-
ber, and the place and date where it was signed. Be-
sides, information about different entities (e.g. peo-
ple) participating in that document might also be re-
quired to be extracted, which comprise entity’s at-
tributes that might not depend on the specific docu-
ment type (e.g., name, identification number, address,
...), as well as attributes that depend on both the doc-
ument type, and the section where the entity appears
(e.g, their role in the legal act, their relationships with
other appearing entities, ...).
The use of machine learning techniques is not rec-
ommended in these scenarios because it is the typical
closed domain with essential and available human in-
volvement (Sarawagi, 2008). The most suitable solu-
tion to overcome these problems is applying regular
expressions to identify the possible patterns, but the
extensive number of pages and the presence of a large
number of similar items does not help. Besides, we
have misspellings and truncated words due to scan-
ning failures, or because of the presence of overlap-
ping elements (e.g., watermarks or stamps).
Therefore, we needed something more powerful
than a collection of regular expressions in order to en-
hance our data extraction procedure.
3 SYSTEM OVERVIEW
In this section, we describe the approach that has been
developed to face the objective of extracting infor-
mation that is contained in legal documents. Briefly,
our system analyzes and extracts a set of specific data
from texts that are written in natural language. The
extraction process is guided by an ontology, which
stores information about the structure and the con-
tent of different types of documents to be processed.
Specifically, this ontology models two types of infor-
mation:
Typology and structure of documents. The ontol-
ogy contains information about the types of doc-
uments, their properties to be extracted, and the
sections that shape them. Each of the sections
modeled in the ontology includes further informa-
tion about which properties have to be extracted
from them, and the entities that might/must be de-
tected within such sections.
Entities and extraction methods. The ontology
contains information about which entities have to
be obtained from each section of a document, how
they should be processed (procedures to be called
to perform the data extraction), and how they re-
late to entities in other sections.
An example of the ontology can be appreciated in
Figure 1. This sample shows an excerpt of the on-
tology devoted to extract information from a type of
document. The elements in capital letters include ref-
erences to the extraction methods. This model makes
it possible to define a modular knowledge-guided ar-
chitecture, so new document types can be added dy-
namically to perform the data extraction.
Figure 2 depicts our approach to data extraction,
which is divided into three main steps that our sys-
tem performs sequentially. We describe these steps
in more detail in the following subsections. The in-
put of the system consists of a set of legal documents
in PDF format with unstructured or semi-structured
information, and their type. All the documents have
been previously scanned and processed by an Opti-
cal Character Recognition (OCR) tool. The output is
a set of XML files with structured information about
the extracted data from each input text.
The AIS Project: Boosting Information Extraction from Legal Documents by using Ontologies
439
Figure 1: A partial sample of the ontology model.
3.1 Step 1: Text Preprocessing
As we can see in Figure 2, this step consists of dif-
ferent tasks that prepare texts before the extraction.
These PDF documents do not contain explicit text,
because they contain scanned images of physical doc-
uments. This is because the owner must keep the
original document and therefore he sends a scanned
document to the management company in charge of
the treatment. So, it is mandatory to apply an OCR
software to identify the text of the documents before
carrying on with the other tasks. Having obtained the
input text, our system uses two additional filters to
improve the quality of the input: the Spell Checker,
and the Cleaner (See Figure 2). The former deals
with correcting words that may appear misspelled or
truncated, while the latter is in charge of cleaning the
noise that the documents may contain, such as signa-
tures, stamps, page numbers, etc. These two steps are
needed because noise and misspelled words can hin-
der our task. To implement them in our prototype we
have used a pair of open source spell checkers: As-
pell
3
, and JOrtho
4
. They have different features and
performances, so we have combined them to get bet-
ter data quality. Regarding the OCR software, while
we consider it an external element, its effectiveness
will clearly influence the quality of our information
extraction.
For example
5
, if we have a document with the fol-
lowing scanned text:
3
http://aspell.net/
4
http://jortho.sourceforge.net/
5
For clarity’s sake, we show the examples in English,
even though AIS works with documents in Spanish.
”AB1234567 JOHN DAVIES NOTARY Fit Cestel-
lana, 1 Phone: 911234567 Fax: 911234567 28046
MADRID IINILATERAL MORTGAE. NUMBER
TWO THOIISAND SIX HUNBRED. In Madrid, on
June 15t, two thousand eleven.– - In front of me,
JOHN DAVIES, Notary of the Illus-[trious College
of Madrid with residence in this capital. APPEAR-
ING AS PART OF THE BORROWER AND THE
MORTGAGER: WILLIAM ROBERTS, of legal age,
single and a resident of MADRID (SPAIN), residing
in stret GRAN VIA, No. 31, and with 012345678G as
identification number...
After the preprocess, we obtain:
”UNILATERAL MORTGAGE. NUMBER TWO
THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED. In Madrid, on June
15th, two thousand eleven. In front of me, JOHN
DAVIES, Notary of the Illustrious College of Madrid
with residence in this capital. APPEARING AS PART
OF THE BORROWER AND THE MORTGAGER:
WILLIAM ROBERTS, of legal age, single and a res-
ident of MADRID (SPAIN), residing in street GRAN
VIA, No. 31, and with 012345678G as identification
number...
This is, the stamp numbers in the example
(”AB1234567 JOHN DAVIES NOTARY Fit Cestel-
lana, 1 Phone: 911234567 Fax: 911234567 28046
MADRID”) have been removed from the OCR input.
ICAART 2016 - 8th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence
440
Figure 2: Steps of our approach to ontology-guided data extraction from legal documents.
3.2 Step 2: Text Chunking
After preprocessing the text, our system consults the
ontology to obtain the structure that it expects depend-
ing on the type of document (see Figure 2). With this
information, AIS identifies the different possible sec-
tions using methods for chunking and labeling texts,
and proceeds to analyze them. After that, for each
section, the system identifies the different entities and
their properties that may appear and participate in that
section (e.g., individuals, legal persons, etc.). This in-
formation is consulted during the processing of sec-
tions to know which extraction methods have to be
used for each entity to be detected in the text.
So, given the document and its type, the system
asks the Ontology handler to obtain information
about sections by querying the ontology. Specifically,
it returns a set of tuples (<Section, Extraction
method, Section features, Section order>)
with the following information:
1. Section: section type to be identified. It could also
be divided into subsections.
2. Extraction method: name of the extraction
method that the system has to invoke to detect the
section in the input text.
3. Section features: data related to the section that
is being processed. For example, its cardinality
(how many times it should appear in the text), mu-
tual exclusion with other section types (sections
that cannot appear in the same document of the
section), and so on.
4. Section order: order in which the sections should
appear. When processing semi-structured and
unstructured documents, we have introduced the
possibility of modeling information about the pro-
cessing order in the ontology.
After consulting this information, the system has a
number of methods to be called on the input text. Us-
ing the definition of the document features, our sys-
tem is able to detect whether the extraction has been
The AIS Project: Boosting Information Extraction from Legal Documents by using Ontologies
441
successful, providing warnings when it has been un-
able to find some particular expected fact. The re-
sult of this step is a set of tuples <Section, Text
fragment>.
Following the previous example, at this step we
obtain two different sections: the introduction and the
appearing. So, after this chunking process, we have:
<Introduction, UNILATERAL MORTGAGE NUMBER
TWO THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED. In Madrid, on
June 15th, two thousand eleven. In front
of me, JOHN DAVIES, Notary of the
Illustrious College of Madrid with
residence in this capital.>
<Appearing, APPEARING AS PART OF THE
BORROWER AND THE MORTGAGER: WILLIAM
ROBERTS, of legal age, single and a
resident of MADRID (SPAIN), residing in
street GRAN VIA, No. 31, and with
012345678G as identification number.>
3.3 Step 3: Section Processing
The final step (see Figure 2) is similar to the previous
one, but it manages different information. The input is
the set of tuples that the previous step returns, which
includes information about the sections and the text
associated to each of them. In this step, the system
consults the ontology to obtain which entities must be
identified in each Section, and it obtains another set
of tuples (<Entity, Extraction method, Entity
features, Entity order>), where:
1. Entity: a specific entity that the system has to de-
tect inside a determined section.
2. Extraction method: the method used to extract in-
formation about this particular entity.
3. Entity features: they contain information about
the properties of the entity to be extracted (sim-
ilar to the information considered for sections).
4. Entity order: order in which the entity should be
extracted.
After that, the system applies different methods
to identify these entities in each pair of <Section,
Text fragment>. This service-oriented approach
which we adopt allows us to integrate in the sys-
tem any extraction method dynamically, ranging from
custom made parsers based on easy rules (e.g., to de-
tect the presence of certain keywords), to more com-
plex ones (e.g., using complex rules or statistical ap-
proaches).
In general, we have a single method for each entity
to be identified that is responsible for trying to extract
as much information as it can about that entity (i.e.,
there will be documents that will only have the name
and ID of a person, while others will have also her/his
marital status and other attributes). All parameters
can be defined and the extraction method will always
try to take all of them. This process can be improved
when a Named Entity Recognizer (NER) (Nadeau
and Sekine, 2007) is used, so that their use is almost
mandatory to achieve optimal results in the process of
extracting information. Finally, note that whole sec-
tion where they appear could be exploited to further
detect and extract information about the relationships
that may occur between entities in the text, applying
rules or patterns to look for them in the extracted and
structured information.
Following the running example, the system
consults the ontology and learns that it has to obtain
the title, the protocol number, the location, the date,
and the notary’s name out from the Introduction
text; and the person, with each one of its properties
(name, address, or identification number) out from
the Appearing section. The system obtains exactly:
<Introduction,
<Title, UNILATERAL MORTGAGE>
<Protocol number, TWO THOUSAND SIX
HUNDRED>
<Location, Madrid>
<Date,June 15th, two thousand eleven>
<Notary’s name, JOHN DAVIES>>
<Appearing,
<Person,
<Name, WILLIAM >
<Surname, ROBERTS>
<Identification number, 012345678G>
<Marital state, single>
<Address, street GRAN VIA, No. 31>
<Location, Madrid>
<Country, Spain>>>
4 PRELIMINARY RESULTS
The data extraction process presented in this paper
has been incorporated into OnCustomer
6
, a commer-
cial Content Relationship Management (CRM) sys-
tem developed by InSynergy Consulting. The ontol-
ogy that is being used has 25 classes and 33 prop-
erties, and information about 2 chunking procedures
and 17 extraction methods. Regarding the NER tool,
we use Freeling
7
, a well known and widely used anal-
ysis tool suite that supports several analysis services
in both Spanish and English, as well other languages
which could be incorporated in our architecture in fu-
ture developments. The extraction methods used in
6
http://www.isyc.com/es/soluciones/oncustomer.html
7
http://nlp.lsi.upc.edu/freeling/
ICAART 2016 - 8th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence
442
the experiments are mainly based on symbolic pat-
tern rules, due to the good performance empirically
obtained with this methodology over this type of doc-
uments.
To evaluate our current prototype, we used a sam-
ple of 144 Spanish notary acts. The extracted data
from this type of document can be grouped in two
different sets:
Document Parameters (Doc-Param in Figure 3),
which are the data that are related to the docu-
ment itself. These parameters are the title of the
document, a protocol number given to the docu-
ment, the date and the location when and where
the document was signed, and the notary’s name.
Person Parameters (Persons in Figure 3), which
corresponds to the data of the persons that are
mentioned in the document. These parameters are
name, surname, national identity number, marital
state, address, region, and country.
We assessed the performance of our approach us-
ing the well-known measures in the field of the Infor-
mation Extraction (precision, recall, and F-measure).
To calculate them, we took into account for each doc-
ument: the number of data to be extracted, the num-
ber of extracted data, and the number of data that have
been retrieved properly. The baseline was the appli-
cation of a set of extraction rules based on regular
expressions without using our ontology-based extrac-
tion approach and without using our document clean-
ing methods. The baseline results was not very good
because these documents were quite long (near one
hundred pages sometimes), and they were full of data
and names, so, the baseline method frequently re-
trieved too many results, most of them erroneous.
We performed two experiments (see results in Fig-
ure 3). The first one was measuring the effect of the
introduction of the use of the ontologies (Steps 2 and
3) to guide the extraction, leading to a substantial im-
provement of the process (Exp. 1). In the second
experiment (Exp. 2), we introduced the use of our
ad-hoc combination of the spell checkers mentioned
in section 3.1, and a text cleaner to eliminate iden-
tifiers, page numbers, stamps, etc. With these new
enhancements, our system achieved better results (a
F-measure above 80%). Of course, the rules to ex-
tract the data used were the same in all experiments
to isolate influences derived from its quality.
We have considered the set of Document Parame-
ters by averaging the results obtained for each of the
data (title, protocol number, etc.). Within this group
we get an average of 85% of precision and 78% of
recall. On the other hand, we have considered the set
of Persons by averaging the results obtained for each
of their attributes (name, address, etc.), and we have
obtained 93% of precision and 72% of recall. In Fig-
ure 3, Global is the mean of both results.
In the analyzed dataset, our proposed system ob-
tained an average of 89% of precision, and 75% of
recall in our data extraction system, which shows the
interest of this proposal. We have also analyzed the
erroneous results, and the system could be enhanced
by improving extraction algorithms, and by adjust-
ing the preliminary cleaning and correction processes.
We should continue exploring more types of docu-
ments, with more relationships and distinct entities;
but it seems clear that having knowledge to guide the
extraction has a very positive influence on this task
on such legal documents, and it facilitates the mainte-
nance labors and the amplifications of the system.
5 STATE OF THE ART
The use of ontologies in the field of Information Ex-
traction (Russell and Norvig, 1995) has increased in
the last years. An ontology is defined as a formal
and explicit specification of a shared conceptualiza-
tion (Gruber, 1993). Thanks to their expressiveness,
they are successfully used to model human knowl-
edge and to implement intelligent systems. Sys-
tems that are based on the use of ontologies for in-
formation extraction are called OBIE systems (On-
tology Based Information Extraction) (Wimalasuriya
and Dou, 2010). The use of an ontological model as a
guideline for the extraction of information from texts
has been successfully applied in other works as (Gar-
rido et al., 2012; Kara et al., 2012; Garrido et al.,
2013; Borobia et al., 2014).
Regarding legal issues, it is interesting to high-
light works such as History Assistant (Jackson et al.,
2003), which extracts rulings from court opinions and
retrieves relevant prior cases from a citator database.
It does all of this by combining natural language
processing techniques with statistical methods. An-
other system to classify fragments of normative texts
into provision types and to extract their arguments
was proposed by (Biagioli et al., 2005). That sys-
tem was based on multiclass Support Vector Ma-
chine classification techniques and on Natural Lan-
guage Processing techniques. More recently we find
TRUTHS (Cheng et al., 2009), a system developed
with a modified the classical Hobbs generic informa-
tion extraction architecture (Appelt et al., 1993) to ex-
tract information from criminal case documents and
to fill up a template.
The definition of extraction ontologies in the con-
text of the Semantic Web was made in (Embley and
The AIS Project: Boosting Information Extraction from Legal Documents by using Ontologies
443
Figure 3: F-measure results from the baseline, and from the experiments 1 and 2.
Zitzelberger, 2010). These conceptual models store
linguistic information for creating canonical annota-
tions that can be used for data storage or query in-
terpretation. In our case, we have created a modular
ontology model, containing on the one hand the lin-
guistic information and the structure of each type of
document, and on the other hand the knowledge of
what to do for extracting data in each part of the doc-
ument, expressed by complex methods more powerful
than regular expressions.
To the best of our knowledge, there are no
other works specially dedicated to the extraction of
data on legal documents in Spanish, taking into ac-
count the special difficulties in processing this lan-
guage (Aguado de Cea et al., 2008; Carrasco and
Gelbukh, 2003), for example: Spanish words contain
much more grammatical and semantic information
than the English words, the subject can be omitted
in many cases, and verb forms carry implicit conjuga-
tion, without additional words. Besides, it is hard to
locate information about extraction systems equipped
with robust methods of extracting in the presence of
OCR problems due to overlapping marks, but we have
found that it is a required task for achieving good re-
sults when working on this type of documentation.
Furthermore, the big difference between these afore-
mentioned works and ours is that we are capturing in
the ontology both the nature of the entities and the
formal structure of documents in order to boost the
extraction process.
6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
Legal documents, such as notarial acts, judicial acts,
or registration documents, are often extensive and the
relevant data to be identified for most of the document
management tasks are often few. Besides, the identi-
fication of these data is still handmade by people in
many organizations. In this paper, we have presented
an approach to carry out an automatic data extraction
from such legal documents. Our extraction process is
guided by the modeled knowledge about the structure
and content of legal documents. This knowledge is
captured in an ontology, which also incorporates in-
formation about the extraction methods to be applied
in each section of the document. The service-oriented
architecture approach we have adopted makes our ap-
proach flexible enough to incorporate different tech-
niques to perform data extraction (via invoked meth-
ods). Finally, the preliminary experiments we have
carried out suggest that exploiting knowledge to guide
the extraction process improves the quality of the re-
sults obtained.
There are several lines of development as future
work. An interesting point is to adapt and expand the
notion of extraction ontologies within our approach.
Moreover, we also want to improve the efficiency of
our approach by using complex rules and statistical
approaches to enrich our extraction methods.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research work has been supported by the CICYT
project TIN2013-46238-C4-4-R, and DGA-FSE. The
authors also thank InSynergy Consulting for their
support and provided framework.
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