Conceptual organization of case law knowledge bases

  • Authors:
  • C. D. Hafner

  • Affiliations:
  • Northeastern Univ., Boston, MA

  • Venue:
  • ICAIL '87 Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Artificial intelligence and law
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

Conceptual retrieval requires the computer to have knowledge of legal concepts and issues, and their relationship to the case law collection. This paper discusses the organization of a case law knowledge base in terms of three interacting components: a domain knowledge model defines the basic concepts of a case law domain; individual case descriptors describe the particular constellation of concepts that pertain to each case, organized into a frame-based superstructure according to the legal roles they fill; and issue/case discrimination trees represent the significance of each case relative to a model of the normative relationships of the legal domain. Each of these components is described and justified by showing its contribution to the goal of conceptual retrieval.