JUSTICE: a judicial search tool using intelligent concept extraction

ABSTRACT

A legal knowledge based system called JUSTICE is presented which provides conceptual information retrieval for legal cases. JUSTICE can identify heterogeneous representations of concepts across all major Australian jurisdictions. The knowledge representation scheme used for legal and common sense concepts is inspired by human processes for the identification of concepts and the expected order and location of concepts. These are supported by flexible search functions and various string utilities. JUSTICE is a client-based legal software agent which works with both plaintext and HTML representations of legal cases over file systems, and the World Wide Web. In creating JUSTICE an ontology for legal cases was developed, and is implicit within JUSTICE. Further, the identification of concepts within data is shown to be a process enabling conceptual information retrieval and search, conceptualised summarisation, automated statistical analysis, and the conversion of informal documents into formalised semi-structured representations. JUSTICE was tested on the precision, recall and usefulness of its concept identifications; achieving good results. The results show the promise of the approach and establish JUSTICE as an intelligent legal research aid offering improved multifaceted access to the concepts within legal cases.

REFERENCES

• 1: AustLII, Australasian Legal Information Institute. http://www.austIii.edu.au
• 2: Trevor J. M. Bench-Capon , Pepijn R. S. Visser, Ontologies in legal information systems; the need for explicit specifications of domain conceptualisations, Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.132-141, June 30-July 03, 1997, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/261618.261646]
• 3: J. Bing, Designing text retrieval systems for conceptual searching, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.43-51, May 27-29, 1997, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/41735.41741]
• 4: Bing, J. (1989) The Law of the Books and the Law of the Files - Possibilities and Probabilities of Legal information Systems, In Vandenberghe G, Advanced Topics of Law and Information Technology (p IS I), Kluwer. The Netherlands.
• 5: Bray, J. Beyond HTML: XML and automated web processirzg, http://developer.netscape.com/viewsource/bray_xml.html, copied Nov 1998.
• 6: Butterworths, CD-ROM containing limited unreported judgments from senior Australian Courts.
• 7: Jody J. Daniels , Edwina L. Rissland, Finding legally relevant passages in case opinions, Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.39-46, June 30-July 03, 1997, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/261618.261627]
• 8: J. P. Dick, Conceptual retrieval and case law, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.106-115, May 27-29, 1997, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/41735.41748]
• 9: Findlaw: http://www.findlaw.com
• 10: Greenleaf, G. (1997) The AustLII Papers - New Directions in Law via the Internet, The Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT) (2). <http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jiit/leginfo/97-2gree/>
• 11: C. D. Hafner, Conceptual organization of case law knowledge bases, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.35-42, May 27-29, 1997, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/41735.41740]
• 12: Marie-Francine Moens , Caroline Uyttendaele , Jos Dumortier, Abstracting of legal cases: the SALOMON experience, Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.114-122, June 30-July 03, 1997, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/261618.261643]
• 13: van Noortwijk, K. and De Mulder R. (1997) The Similarity of Text Documents, Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT) 2. http://eIj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/artifint/97-2noor/default.htm
• 14: Osborn, J. LegalCase.dtd, http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/-osborn
• 15: Daniel Poulin , Guy Huard , Alain Lavoie, The other formalization of law: SGML modelling and tagging, Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, p.82-88, June 30-July 03, 1997, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/261618.261637]
• 16: SCALEplus, The legal information retrieval system owned bY the Australian Attorney General's Department, http://SCALEplus.law.gov.au/
• 17: Mark Stefik, Introduction to knowledge systems, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1995
• 18: Leon Sterling, On Finding Needles in WWW Haystacks, Proceedings of the 10th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence, p.25-36, November 30-December 04, 1997
• 19: Zeleznikow, J. & Hunter D. (1994) Building Intelligent Legal information Systems. Kluwer Law and Taxation Publishers, Deventer, The Netherlands.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

General Terms:
Experimentation, Theory

Keywords:
conceptual information retrieval, intelligent law information systems, intelligent research aid, legal WWW agent, legal knowledge representation, legal ontology