Thesaurus-based Retrieval of Case Law

In the context of intelligent disclosure of case law, we report on our findings on methods for retrieving relevant case law within the domain of tort law from a repository of 68.000 court verdicts. We apply a thesaurus-based technique to find specific legal situations. It appears that statistical measures of term relevance are insufficient, but that explicit knowledge about specific formulations used in law and case law are required to distinguish relevant case law from irrelevant. In addition, we found out that retrieving legal concepts with an “interpretive” character requires a different method than retrieving concepts that do not require additional interpretation.

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