The AIS Project: Boosting Information Extraction from Legal Documents by using Ontologies

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.