A hybrid legal decision‐support system using both rule‐based and case‐based reasoning
Kamalendu Pal, John A. Campbell · Information & Communications Technology Law · 1996
A hybrid legal knowledge‐based system, Advisory Support for Home Settlement in Divorce (ASHSD), is discussed. Legal knowledge for ASHSD is represented in two forms, as rules and cases. Besides distinguishing the two different forms of knowledge representation, the paper outlines the actual use of these forms in a computational architecture that is designed to generate a suitable solution for a given new case. Methods of measuring similarity between items (e.g. rules that are triggered and rules where not all preconditions are true in a given situation; past cases and the statement of a current problem) by techniques of numerical taxonomy are exploited for this purpose. The same methods give a convenient means of assessing whether a new problem is better tackled by calling on rules that express the usual legal knowledge in the area or by referring to a past case that has overridden the rules.