The number of available legal documents has presented an enormous growth in recent years, and the digital processing of such materials is prompting the necessity of systems that support the automatic relevant information extraction. This work presents a system for ontology-based information extraction from natural language texts, able to identify a set of legal events. The system is based on an innovative methodology based on domain ontology of legal events and a set of linguistic rules, integrated through inference mechanism, resulting in a flexible approach and scalable approach. A case study with the use of documents from the Superior Court in Brazil is related, with satisfactory results in precision and recall.

Artificial Intellingence and Law