Nada Mimouni

A relational approach for information retrieval on XML legal sources

In the information retrieval (IR) domain a collection of documents is represented as a set of documents where cross references between documents are usually not taken into account in the querying process. This standard document model is not tailored to legal professional uses where the context of interpretation is crucial. Existing access tools do not take into account the complexity of references between legal documents. XML based standards have been created to facilitate access and management of legal data. Their exploitation for IR purposes offers new possibilities for advanced search techniques. In this work, we propose a novel approach allowing to exploit the XML standard formats of legal documents to query a collection of related documents and return relevant answers to the end-user. We consider exploiting at the same time the semantic content of the documents and their interrelationships using Formal and Relational Concept Analysis. Answers are presented as documents or graphs of interlinked documents.

A Conceptual Approach for Relational IR: Application to Legal Collections

Everyone who works in the legal field is faced with the complexity of documentary sources of law, that are highly interrelated and interdependent of each others. It is essential for legal practitioners to rely on systems that retrieve all the sources related to the legal cases they are working on and not only the most relevant ones. The challenge for legal IR is to achieve exhaustivity and handle this complexity by retrieving documents on the basis of the semantic content and the intertextual relationships. This work proposes an IR approach for legal sources that goes beyond existing systems. It is based on Formal and Relational Concept Analysis to structure, query and browse collections of legal documents.

Answering Complex Queries on Legal Networks: A Direct and a Structured IR Approaches

This paper highlights the benefit of semantic information retrieval in legal networks. User queries get more complex when they combine constraints on semantic content and intertextual links between documents. Comparing two methods of search in legal collection networks, we present new functionalities of search and browsing. Relying on a structured representation of the collection graph, the first approach allows for approximate answers and knowledge discovery. The second one supports richer semantics and scalability but offers fewer search functionalities. We indicate how those approaches could be combined to get the best of both.