RT Journal Article
T1 Assisting Forensic Identification through Unsupervised Information Extraction of Free Text Autopsy Reports: The Disappearances Cases during the Brazilian Military Dictatorship
A1 Martín Rodilla, Patricia
A1 Hattori, Marcia L.
A1 González Pérez, César
K1 Information extraction
K1 Named entity recognition
K1 Terminology extraction
K1 Autopsy reports
AB Anthropological, archaeological, and forensic studies situate enforced disappearance as a strategy associated with the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985), leaving hundreds of persons without identity or cause of death identified. Their forensic reports are the only existing clue for people identification and detection of possible crimes associated with them. The exchange of information among institutions about the identities of disappeared people was not a common practice. Thus, their analysis requires unsupervised techniques, mainly due to the fact that their contextual annotation is extremely time-consuming, difficult to obtain, and with high dependence on the annotator. The use of these techniques allows researchers to assist in the identification and analysis in four areas: Common causes of death, relevant body locations, personal belongings terminology, and correlations between actors such as doctors and police officers involved in the disappearances. This paper analyzes almost 3000 textual reports of missing persons in São Paulo city during the Brazilian dictatorship through unsupervised algorithms of information extraction in Portuguese, identifying named entities and relevant terminology associated with these four criteria. The analysis allowed us to observe terminological patterns relevant for people identification (e.g., presence of rings or similar personal belongings) and automate the study of correlations between actors. The proposed system acts as a first classificatory and indexing middleware of the reports and represents a feasible system that can assist researchers working in pattern search among autopsy reports
PB MDPI
YR 2019
FD 2019
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/23823
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/23823
LA eng
NO Martin-Rodilla, P.; Hattori, M.L.; Gonzalez-Perez, C. Assisting Forensic Identification through Unsupervised Information Extraction of Free Text Autopsy Reports: The Disappearances Cases during the Brazilian Military Dictatorship. Information 2019, 10, 231
NO This research was partially funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and 5 Competitiveness under its Competitive Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Research Programme, grant FJCI-2016-6 28032 and from the European Union, through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network ‘CHEurope: Critical Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe’ H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, grant 722416
DS Minerva
RD 25 abr 2026