M. Saravanan, B. Ravindran, and S. Raman, all of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, in Chennai, India, have recently posted Improving Legal Information Retrieval Using an Ontological Framework, forthcoming in Artificial Intelligence and Law. Here is the abstract:
“A variety of legal documents are increasingly being made available in electronic format. Automatic Information Search and Retrieval algorithms play a key role in enabling efficient access to such digitized documents. Although keyword-based search is the traditional method used for text retrieval, they perform poorly when literal term matching is done for query processing, due to synonymy and ambivalence of words. To overcome these drawbacks, an ontological framework to enhance the user’s query for retrieval of truly relevant legal judgments has been proposed in this paper. Ontologies ensure efficient retrieval by enabling inferences based on domain knowledge, which is gathered during the construction of the knowledge base. Empirical results demonstrate that ontology-based searches generate significantly better results than traditional search methods.”
Tags: Knowledge representation, Legal ontologies, Legal knowledge representation, Legal information retrieval, Information storage and retrieval systems Law
