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Top2. Context
A jurisprudence decision is presented as a textual document of two to five pages. Decisions share a regularity of content. When he reads a decision, the lawyer takes quite a long time to define its parts and determine the part or parts that are most interesting and can help him to solve the new problem.Unlike case law retrieval systems that currently exist, the method we shall suggest henceforth will present decisions not in their original text states but rather in a structured format.
In this article, we present our approach for decision structuring. The methodology adopted in this work consists of a set of ordered steps: Step1: training corpus construction with different types of decisions and manually annotated by experts; Step 2: Analysis of this corpus in order to define the patterns; Step3: decisions structuring.
Our study corpus is composed of 600 decisions of the cassation Court, available on the Tunisian portal of justice and human rights. The analysis stage was carried out in close collaboration with legal experts to determine how to structure a decision. Read a decision, is not always clear. Fluency is acquired over the experience. When reading, the lawyerreview the decision in a comprehensive manner, and attempts to recognize the descriptive blocks and the reasoning blocks. Descriptive blocks describe facts and the legal actions. Reasoning Blocks are the step in which the judge uses the facts to reach a decision in law.Fifty decisions of different types (civil, administrative, criminal, etc.) were analyzed in order to identify regularities in their content. An organizational structure has been defined. A decision is composed of: