Searching without Search Terms: Mapping Concepts to Authorities in Law
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Presentation speakers
- Philip Chung
- Andrew Mowbray, Professor of Law and Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney
- Graham Greenleaf, Professor of Law & Information Systems, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Legal documents generally contain a rich set of authorities and references including cases, legislation and law journal articles. This underlying structure can be utilised to facilitate different forms of searching and categorisation. Patterns of references can be used to describe materials falling in distinct clusters. Applications of this approach discussed in the paper include: lateral search (that is, using vectors of similar reference patterns, to find related materials) ; automated creation of subject indices (including identification of conceptual hierarchies) ; and generation of document descriptions.
