Thomson Reuters Global Resources

Thomson Reuters Global Resources Unlimited Company

Qiang Lu

Michael Dahn

Jack G Conrad

William M Keenan

Khalid Al-Kofahi

Thomas Zielund

Patrick Slaven

Charles Elberti

The present inventor devised, among other things, an information retrieval system that determines whether a query is ambiguous or not and based on this determination either continues or aborts a search process. One query evaluation extracts word pairs from an input query and uses features of the extracted word pairs, for example the number of word pairs and their frequencies within a document collection, to determine if the query is ambiguous or not. Another evaluation measures topical convergence, using query related caselaw headnotes that are associated with topics in a legal taxonomy. And yet another checks topical convergence through the lens of full caselaw documents and secondary legal documents, such as law review articles, specifically the minimum number of case law and secondary legal documents that are necessary to span a set of top ranked topics identified using the query.

Systems, methods and software for evaluating user queries

To facilitate legal research, companies, such as Thomson West provide subscription-based online information-retrieval systems. Seeking to improve these and/or related systems, the present inventors devised, among other things, an exemplary legal research system that performs a conventional search to identify a set of starter documents and then leverages the metadata associated with these starter documents to identify another larger set of relevant documents. Documents in this alternate set are then scored using, for example, a learning machine and feature vectors that account for metadata relationships between the starter documents and alternate documents.

Systems, methods, and software for identifying relevant legal documents

The present invention makes legal research more efficient by selecting clusters in response to the behavior of a user (e.g., a legal professional such as a paralegal, lawyer, or judge). The clusters, which are formed prior to the user accessing a legal document (and thus, providing user behavior to a system), are identified to the based upon a set of metadata associated with the legal document. At least two clusters are identified and a signal associated therewith is transmitted to the user. Each cluster is associated with a unique legal topic. Further, each cluster may comprise primary and/or secondary authority.

Systems, methods, and interfaces for extending legal search results

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Pittsford, NY, United States of America

Qiang Lu