Text and Citations Based Cluster Analysis of Legal Judgments

Developing efficient approaches to extract relevant information from a collection of legal judgments is a research issue. Legal judgments contain citations in addition to text. It can be noted that the link information has been exploited to build efficient search systems in web domain. Similarly, the citation information in legal judgments could be utilized for efficient search. In this paper, we have proposed an approach to find similar judgments by exploiting citations in legal judgments through cluster analysis. As several judgments have few citations, a notion of paragraph link is employed to increase the number of citations in the judgment. User evaluation study on the judgment dataset of Supreme Court of India shows that the proposed clustering approach is able to find similar judgments by exploiting citations and paragraph links. Overall, the results show that citation information in judgments can be exploited to establish similarity between judgments.

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