Abstract
The concept of ‘relevance’ is crucial to legal information retrieval, but because of its intuitive understanding it goes undefined too easily and unexplored too often. We discuss a conceptual framework on relevance within legal information retrieval, based on a typology of relevance dimensions used within general information retrieval science, but tailored to the specific features of legal information. This framework can be used for the development and improvement of legal information retrieval systems.
Highlights
Legal information retrieval (LIR) has always been a research topic within Artificial Intelligence and Law (‘AI & Law’): in ‘A History of AI & Law in 50 papers’ (Bench-Capon et al 2012) seven of those 50 papers have a relation to LIR
In this paper we develop a framework for the concept of relevance in legal information retrieval and come forward with suggestions for improvements in LIR systems
Because most academic research on information retrieval is about non-self-contained domains, bibliographical relevance is not considered to be a relevance dimension of its own [compare e.g. (Cosijn and Ingwersen 2000; Saracevic 1996)]
Summary
Legal information retrieval (LIR) has always been a research topic within Artificial Intelligence and Law (‘AI & Law’): in ‘A History of AI & Law in 50 papers’ (Bench-Capon et al 2012) seven of those 50 papers have a relation to LIR. Santos reformulating it is the aim.’’1 Not surprisingly, LIR has been approached within AI & Law primarily with a focus on conceptualization of legal information, while for daily legal work that might not always be the most effective approach. To limit the role of LIR within daily legal practice to just finding the court decisions relevant to the case at hand underestimates the complexities of the law and of legal information seeking behaviour. LIR systems have been designed to support legal information-seeking, but without accommodating the characteristics of legal information-seeking behavior (Sutton 1994). In this paper we develop a framework for the concept of relevance in legal information retrieval and come forward with suggestions for improvements in LIR systems.
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