Abstract
“Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity. Maximizing access to this information promotes justice and the rule of law”. In accordance with the aforementioned declaration on free access to law by legal information institutes of the world, a plethora of legal information is available through the Internet, while the provision of legal information has never before been easier. Given that law is accessed by a much wider group of people, the majority of whom are not legally trained or qualified, diversification techniques should be employed in the context of legal information retrieval, as to increase user satisfaction. We address the diversification of results in legal search by adopting several state of the art methods from the web search, network analysis and text summarization domains. We provide an exhaustive evaluation of the methods, using a standard dataset from the common law domain that we objectively annotated with relevance judgments for this purpose. Our results: (i) reveal that users receive broader insights across the results they get from a legal information retrieval system; (ii) demonstrate that web search diversification techniques outperform other approaches (e.g., summarization-based, graph-based methods) in the context of legal diversification; and (iii) offer balance boundaries between reinforcing relevant documents or sampling the information space around the legal query.
Highlights
Nowadays, as a consequence of many open data initiatives, more and more publicly available portals and datasets provide legal resources to citizens, researchers and legislation stakeholders
Our findings reveal that (i) diversification methods, employed in the context of legal IR, demonstrate notable improvements in terms of enriching search results with otherwise hidden aspects of the legal query space and (ii) web search diversification techniques outperform other approaches, e.g., summarization-based, graph-based methods, in the context of legal diversification
We evaluated all of the methods using a real dataset from the common law domain that we objectively annotated with relevance judgments for this purpose
Summary
As a consequence of many open data initiatives, more and more publicly available portals and datasets provide legal resources to citizens, researchers and legislation stakeholders. Legal data that were previously available only to a specialized audience and in “closed” format are freely available on the Internet Portals, such as the EUR-Lex (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/), the European Union’s database of regulations, the on-line version of the United States Code (http://uscode.house.gov/), United Kingdom (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/), Brazil (http://www.lexml.gov.br/) and the Australian one (https://www.comlaw.gov.au/), just to mention a few, serve as an endpoint to access millions of regulations, legislation, judicial cases or administrative decisions. Such portals allow for Algorithms 2017, 10, 22; doi:10.3390/a10010022 www.mdpi.com/journal/algorithms. We propose a novel way to efficiently and effectively handle similar challenges when seeking information in the legal domain
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