Legal Information Retrieval
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Legal Information Retrieval
Legal information retrieval is the science of information retrieval applied to legal text, including legislation, case law, and scholarly works. Accurate legal information retrieval is important to provide access to the law to laymen and legal professionals. Its importance has increased because of the vast and quickly increasing amount of legal documents available through electronic means.Jackson et al., p. 60 Legal information retrieval is a part of the growing field of legal informatics. In a legal setting, it is frequently important to retrieve all information related to a specific query. However, commonly used boolean search methods (exact matches of specified terms) on full text legal documents have been shown to have an average recall rate as low as 20 percent,Blair, D.C., and Maron, M.E., 1985, p.293 meaning that only 1 in 5 relevant documents are actually retrieved. In that case, researchers believed that they had retrieved over 75% of relevant documents. This may result in ...
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Information Retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds. Automated information retrieval systems are used to reduce what has been called information overload. An IR system is a software system that provides access to books, journals and other documents; stores and manages those documents. Web search engines are the most visible IR applications. Overview An information retrieval process begins when a user or searcher enters a query into the system. Queries are formal statements of information needs, for example search strings in web search engines. In inf ...
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Superior Court
In common law systems, a superior court is a court of general jurisdiction over civil and criminal legal cases. A superior court is "superior" in relation to a court with limited jurisdiction (see small claims court), which is restricted to civil cases involving monetary amounts with a specific limit, or criminal cases involving offenses of a less serious nature. A superior court may hear appeals from lower courts (see court of appeal). For courts of general jurisdiction in civil law system, see ordinary court. Etymology The term "superior court" has its origins in the English court system. The royal courts were the highest courts in the country, with what would now be termed supervisory jurisdiction over baronial and local courts. Decisions of those courts could be reviewed by the royal courts, as part of the Crown's role as the ultimate fountain of justice. The royal courts became known as the "superior courts", and lower courts whose decisions could be reviewed by the royal c ...
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Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them. The technology can then accurately extract information and insights contained in the documents as well as categorize and organize the documents themselves. Challenges in natural language processing frequently involve speech recognition, natural-language understanding, and natural-language generation. History Natural language processing has its roots in the 1950s. Already in 1950, Alan Turing published an article titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence, t ...
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Information Retrieval Genres
Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sense A sense is a biological system used by an organism for sensation, the process of gathering information about the world through the detection of Stimulus (physiology), stimuli. (For example, in the human body, the brain which is part of the cen ...d. Any natural process that is not completely random, and any observable pattern in any medium can be said to convey some amount of information. Whereas digital signals and other data use discrete Sign (semiotics), signs to convey information, other phenomena and artifacts such as analog signals, poems, pictures, music or other sounds, and current (fluid), currents convey information in a more continuous form. Information is not knowledge itself, but the meaning (philosophy), meaning that may be derived from a representation (mathematics), re ...
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Computer-assisted Legal Research
Computer-assisted legal research (CALR) or computer-based legal research is a mode of legal research that uses databases of court opinions, statutes, court documents, and secondary material. Electronic databases make large bodies of case law easily available. Databases also have additional benefits, such as Boolean searches, evaluating case authority, organizing cases by topic, and providing links to cited material. Databases are available through paid subscription or for free. Subscription-based services include Westlaw, LexisNexis, JustCite, HeinOnline, Bloomberg Law, Lex Intell, VLex and LexEur. As of 2015, the commercial market grossed $8 billion. Free services include OpenJurist, Google Scholar, AltLaw, Ravel Law, WIPO Lex, Law Delta and the databases of the Free Access to Law Movement. Purposes Computer-assisted legal research is undertaken by a variety of actors. It is taught as a topic in many law degrees and is used extensively by undergraduate and postgraduate law st ...
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Page Rank
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According to Google: Currently, PageRank is not the only algorithm used by Google to order search results, but it is the first algorithm that was used by the company, and it is the best known. As of September 24, 2019, PageRank and all associated patents are expired. Description PageRank is a link analysis algorithm and it assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element ''E'' is referred to as the ''PageRank of E'' and denoted by PR(E). A PageRank results ...
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F-measure
In statistical analysis of binary classification, the F-score or F-measure is a measure of a test's accuracy. It is calculated from the precision and recall of the test, where the precision is the number of true positive results divided by the number of all positive results, including those not identified correctly, and the recall is the number of true positive results divided by the number of all samples that should have been identified as positive. Precision is also known as positive predictive value, and recall is also known as sensitivity in diagnostic binary classification. The F1 score is the harmonic mean of the precision and recall. The more generic F_\beta score applies additional weights, valuing one of precision or recall more than the other. The highest possible value of an F-score is 1.0, indicating perfect precision and recall, and the lowest possible value is 0, if either precision or recall are zero. Etymology The name F-measure is believed to be named after ...
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Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them. The technology can then accurately extract information and insights contained in the documents as well as categorize and organize the documents themselves. Challenges in natural language processing frequently involve speech recognition, natural-language understanding, and natural-language generation. History Natural language processing has its roots in the 1950s. Already in 1950, Alan Turing published an article titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence, t ...
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LexisNexis
LexisNexis is a part of the RELX corporation that sells data analytics products and various databases that are accessed through online portals, including portals for computer-assisted legal research (CALR), newspaper search, and consumer information. During the 1970s, LexisNexis began to make legal and journalistic documents more accessible electronically. , the company had the world's largest electronic database for legal and public-records–related information. History LexisNexis is owned by RELX (formerly known as Reed Elsevier). According to Trudi Bellardo Hahn and Charles P. Bourne, LexisNexis (originally founded as LEXIS) is historically significant because it was the first of the early information services to envision a future in which large populations of end users would directly interact with computer databases, rather than going through professional intermediaries like librarians. Available through IEEE Xplore. Other early information services in the 1970s met with f ...
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Westlaw
Westlaw is an online legal research service and proprietary database for lawyers and legal professionals available in over 60 countries. Information resources on Westlaw include more than 40,000 databases of case law, state and federal statutes, administrative codes, newspaper and magazine articles, public records, law journals, law reviews, treatises, legal forms and other information resources. Most legal documents on Westlaw are indexed to the West Key Number System, which is West's master classification system of U.S. law. Westlaw supports natural language and Boolean searches. Other significant Westlaw features include KeyCite, a citation checking service, which customers use to determine whether cases or statutes are still good law, and a customizable tabbed interface that lets customers bring their most-used resources to the top. Other tabs organize Westlaw content around the specific work needs of litigators, in-house corporate practitioners, and lawyers who specializ ...
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Ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exist on the most fundamental level. Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of categories that encompasses classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include substances, properties, relations, states of affairs and events. These categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts, including particularity and universality, abstractness and concreteness, or possibility and necessity. Of special interest is the concept of ontological dependence, which determines whether the entities of a category exist on the most fundamental level. Disagreements within ontology are often about whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they ...
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Boolean Search
In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts represented in databases (such as titles, abstracts, selected sections, or bibliographical references). In a full-text search, a search engine examines all of the words in every stored document as it tries to match search criteria (for example, text specified by a user). Full-text-searching techniques became common in online bibliographic databases in the 1990s. Many websites and application programs (such as word processing software) provide full-text-search capabilities. Some web search engines, such as AltaVista, employ full-text-search techniques, while others index only a portion of the web pages examined by their indexing systems. Indexing When dealing with a small number of documents, it is possible for the full-text-search engine t ...
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