1.2. Objectives

The research presented in this thesis is a segment of the IRIS project developed by INESC-ID Lisboa for STJ. Project IRIS aims to develop summarization approaches for court decisions and create a representation able to be browsed in a way that is helpful in the court decision process.

As mentioned beforehand, retrieving desired information might be more complex than one wishes. The first challenge someone faces when procuring information, is in the choosing of (adequate) words to input into the search query. Even though judges might use specific terminology terms, the system should be resilient enough to access information based on Natural Language (NL). One will always find adversity when constructing a sophisticated and appropriate query that expresses the correct need for specific information. Having these motivations well-defined, it is the aim of this thesis to develop a reliable semantic search system for STJ that will help in the court decision process.