Case-based Retrieval of Refugee Review Tribunal Text Cases
John L. Yearwood · 1998
Reasoning from cases has always played a large part in law and so the ability to effectively retrieve and reuse old cases in formulating newdecisions and arguments is important. This paper examines techniques for improving retrieval effectiveness by using the structure present in the text cases. The Refugee Review Tribunal cases are pre-processed into a consistent structure and evidence from the case components is combined using retrieval functions based on different strategies for determining the importance of components. The work indicates that a minimum success level in retrieval would be 54 % based on a simple rule, the use of full text matching has a 66 % success rate and the combination of case component evidence produces a similar success rate. Better results are achieved when a derived legal structure is usedandevenwith a simple derivative process the results have greater depth. 1.