JUSTICE: a judicial search tool using intelligent concept extraction

  • Authors:

  • James Osborn;Leon Sterling

  • Affiliations:

  • Intelligent Agent Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, 3052, Australia;Intelligent Agent Laboratory, Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, 3052, Australia

  • Venue:
  • ICAIL '99 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law
  • Year:
  • 1999

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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.