Inferring and explaining potential citations to binding precedents in Brazilian Supreme Court Decisions
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Data
2021-12
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Poco, Jorge
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Resumo
The Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) is the highest law court in Brazil and it is primarily responsible for guarding the Brazilian Constitution. To reduce judicial insecurity and the high Court’s workload, a Constitutional Amendment from 2004 allowed STF to create binding precedents (“Súmulas Vinculantes,” BPs). A BP is a statement that consolidates the understanding of STF about a legal matter and has mandatory application for lower branches of the Judiciary. Frequently, an STF Justice cites a BP in a decision, and it is trivial to search for these explicit citations using regular expressions. However, it is not trivial to assert whether a decision potentially cites the statement, in the sense of “it should have cited it, but it did not” or “it addresses a similar issue, so they are related.” This work explores machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to infer and explain these potential citations. The inference is performed using models from classical machine learning theory and recent NLP research, and the explanation is achieved using a machine learning explainability technique. The models learn what characterizes a citation through training on documents with explicit citations, in which we demonstrate they achieve high performance. We present two case studies that demonstrate the usefulness of the trained models to search for potential citations when accompanied
by the explainability technique to inform the most relevant parts of the document for the potential citation assignment.
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Trabalho de conclusão de curso