On the concept of relevance in legal information retrieval

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.

Bibliometric-Enhanced Legal Information Retrieval

“…authority, legal hierarchy and whether the document is annotated) that are usually grouped under cognitive or situational relevance, and thereby considered to be personal, but that users in the legal domain agree on. The agreement within the field makes that these factors can be grouped under domain relevance as described by Van Opijnen and Santos [10].…”

“…The context of Dutch legal publications and their citation culture is provided by Stolker [16] and Snel [15]. This research is inspired by work of Van Opijnen and Santos [10], who translate the theory of Saracevic [13] on the spheres of relevance to the legal domain. The work of Barry and Schamber [2,3] describes the different indicators of relevance as identified by users.…”

Towards an open and decentralized case law curation ecosystem

“…Anonymization of case law documents is another significant matter that needs to be addressed. While it has been noted that anonymization can make legal research harder [7,55], countries which have adopted strict data protection laws are making efforts to remove identifying information such as names of physical persons occurring in the bodies of court decisions. Several countries aim to completely anonymize case law and have already kick-started the process of upgrading their anonymization tools for this purpose [56,57].…”

A Query System for Extracting Requirements-Related Information from Legal Texts

“…Opijnen and Santos [20] identify two types of IT systems in the legal domain: (1) legal expert systems (LES) and (2) systems for legal information retrieval (LIR). While LES rely on Semantic Web technologies (taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, legal ontologies) to provide a specific answer to a query, LIR is more concerned with retrieving relevant legal documents (or parts thereof) in larger corpora.…”