Opinion mining in legal blogs

We perform a survey into the scope and utility of opinion mining in legal Weblogs (a.k.a. blawgs). The number of `blogs' in the legal domain is growing at a rapid pace and many potential applications for opinion detection and monitoring are arising as a result. We summarize current approaches to opinion mining before describing different categories of blawgs and their potential impact on the law and the legal profession. In addition to educating the community on recent developments in the legal blog space, we also conduct some introductory opinion mining trials. We first construct a Weblog test collection containing blog entries that discuss legal search tools. We subsequently examine the performance of a language modeling approach deployed for both subjectivity analysis (i.e., is the text subjective or objective?) and polarity analysis (i.e., is the text affirmative or negative towards its subject?). This work may thus help establish early baselines for these core opinion mining...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICAIL
• Authors: Jack G. Conrad, Frank Schilder
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, ICAIL 2007, Information Storage, Legal, Opinion Mining