Science and Technology

Artificial intelligence will speed up the digitization of rulings for easier access

October 9th 2023updated on October 16th 2023 at 12:21

The Supreme Court of Justice will introduce AI tools developed by researchers from Técnico and INESC-ID

The results of the IRIS (Information, Rationalization, Integration and Summarization) project were announced on 4th October. The project was commissioned by the Supreme Court of Justice (STJ) to Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores: Investigação e Desenvolvimento (INESC-ID), and took place from September 2020 to August 2023, bringing together sixteen members of the Técnico community, including professors, researchers, master’s and doctoral students. The project also involved ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL).

Three tools have been developed:

Optical character recognition service that allows the digitization of large documents (more than a thousand pages), enabling the STJ to convert old rulings to text once they have been digitized;
Online publication service of the STJ’s jurisprudence, designed for any type of user (whether an ordinary citizen, legal professional, journalist, etc.), which allows to search the 70,000 rulings already on digital record;
Anonymization tool, which is already being used by the STJ, and will now be made available to all courts of first instance or other institutions that express an interest in using it (including in Portuguese-speaking African countries and East Timor).

To this end, the IRIS research team used artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques such as (1) optical character recognition to extract text from scanned documents, (2) document search and retrieval and (3) natural language processing, among others.

According to José Borbinha, a Técnico professor and the scientific coordinator of the project at INESC-ID, “one of the main motivations for this project were the Conclusions of the Council of the Member States of the European Union”, a document published in the Official Journal of the European Union”. In this sense, “the project team has made important technological and innovative contributions to the implementation of some of these recommendations in Portugal,” he adds.

The IRIS project is co-funded by the Support System for Digital Transformation of the Public Administration (SAMA), under COMPETE 2020 as part of the Portugal 2020, and by the European Social Fund.