# LegalNLP -- Natural Language Processing methods for the Brazilian Legal Language

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.15709 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15709/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- [Exploring the Use of Text Classification in the Legal Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09306/) (2017)
- [Portuguese Word Embeddings: Evaluating on Word Analogies and Natural Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06025/) (2017)
- [Predicting Legal Proceedings Status: Approaches Based on Sequential Text Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11561/) (2020)
- [Document classification using a Bi-LSTM to unclog Brazil's supreme court](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11569/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Bringing order into the realm of Transformer-based language models for artificial intelligence and law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05502/) (2023)
- [Tucano: Advancing Neural Text Generation for Portuguese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07854/) (2024)
- [Juru: Legal Brazilian Large Language Model from Reputable Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18140/) (2024)
- [The interplay between domain specialization and model size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02068/) (2025)
- [Evaluation of AI Ethics Tools in Language Models: A Developers' Perspective Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15791/) (2025)
- [Language Models for Portuguese: A Systematic Mapping Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18138/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present and make available pre-trained language models (Phraser, Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, FastText, and BERT) for the Brazilian legal language, a Python package with functions to facilitate their use, and a set of demonstrations/tutorials containing some applications involving them. Given that our material is built upon legal texts coming from several Brazilian courts, this initiative is extremely helpful for the Brazilian legal field, which lacks other open and specific tools and language models. Our main objective is to catalyze the use of natural language processing tools for legal texts analysis by the Brazilian industry, government, and academia, providing the necessary tools and accessible material.