Fostering Judiciary Applications with New Fine-Tuned Models for Legal Named Entity Recognition in Portuguese

Artificial Intelligence applied to Lawis getting attention in the community, both from the Judiciary and the lawyers, due to possible gains in procedural celerity and the automation of repetitive tasks, among other use cases. Many of its benefits can be derived from Natural Language Processing since legal proceedings are textual document-based. Named Entity Recognition is the NLP task of identifying and classifying named entities in unstructured text to help achieve these goals. In recent years, transformers emerged as the new state-of-the-art architecture for some tasks in NLP systems. NLP resources in Portuguese, such as models and datasets, are needed to allow Portuguese speaking countries to benefit from this new NLP level. This paper presents the first fine-tuned BERT models trained exclusively on Brazilian Portuguese for Legal NER. The models achieved new state-of-the-art on LeNER-Br dataset, a Portuguese NER corpus for the legal domain. We also built a prototype application for Judiciary users to evaluate how the model performed with authentic law documents. The results showed that the models were able to extract information with good quality. Both the models and the prototype application are publicly available for the community.