Finding legally relevant passages in case opinions
Jody J. Daniels, Edwina L. Rissland · 1997
This paper presents a hybrid case-based reasoning (CBR) and information retrieval (IR) system, called SPIRE, that locates passages likely to contain information about legally relevant features of cases found in full-text court opinions. SPIRE uses an example base of excerpts from past opinions to form queries, which are run by the INQUERY IR text retrieval engine on individual case opinions. These opinions can be those found by SPIRE in a prior stage of processing, which also employs a hybrid CBR-IR approach to retrieve relevant texts from large document corpora. (This aspect of SPIRE was reported on at ICAIL95.) We present an overview of SPIRE, run through an extended example, and give results comparing SPIRE's with human performance. 1 Introduction There is an enormous amount of legal text available on-line and it is growing every day. While this is a decided benefit for legal research, it also presents a problem of how to search it effectively. In particular, it is no easy task to...