Identification of Case Content with Quantitative Network Analysis: An Example from the ECtHR

What is a case decided by the European Court of Human Rights about? The Courts own case database, HUDOC , lists all the articles mentioned in a specific case in their metadata. They also supply a number of keywords, but these keywords for the most part are reduced to repeating phrases from the relevant articles. In order to enhance information retrieval about case content, without relying on manual labor and subjective judgement, we propose in this paper a quantitative method that gives a better indication of case content in terms of which articles a given case is more closely associated with. To do so, we rely on the network structure induced by existing case-to-case and case-to-article citations and propose two computational approaches (referred to as MainIn and MainOut) which result in assigning one representative article to each case. We validate the approach by selecting a sample of important cases and comparing manual investigation of real content of those cases with the MainIn and MainOut articles. Results show that MainIn in particular is able to infer correctly the real content in most of the cases.