LeSSE - A Semantic Search Engine Applied to Portuguese Consumer Law

Nuno Pablo Cordeiro, João Dias, Pedro A. Santos

Abstract: For the rule of law to work well, citizens should know their rights and obligations, especially in a day to day context such as when posing as a consumers. Despite being available online, the Portuguese Consumer law was not accessible to the point of being able easy to insert a sentence written in natural language in a search engine and getting a clear response without first having to scroll through multiple little applicable search results. To solve this issue, we introduce Legal Semantic Search Engine (LeSSE), an information retrieval system that uses a hybrid approach of semantic and lexical information retrieval techniques. The new system performed better than the lexical search system in production.