Concept Extraction from Legal Cases: The Use of a Statistic of Coincidence

Effective retrieval of court decisions is important. Automatically identifying legal concepts in the decision texts would be very helpful. In this paper we investigate how a statistics for hypothesis testing, i.e., the likelihood ratio, can help in this task. We describe how this statistic can be used for detecting important multi-term phrases in the case texts, how it can be used to find correlated terms, and how it is a means for feature or topic signature selection in automated case categorization. The technology has been tested upon more than 600 US cases. Keywords Conceptual information retrieval, concept extraction, ontology building.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ICAIL
• Authors: Marie-Francine Moens, Roxana Angheluta
• Keywords: Effective Retrieval, ICAIL 2003, Important Multi-term Phrases, Topic Signature Selection