Lexisnexis Group

Lexisnexis

Lexis-nexis Group, a Division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Xin Allan Lu

Timothy Lee Humphrey

James S Wiltshire, Jr

Salahuddin Ahmed

John T Morelock

Paul Zhang

Spiro G Collias

Afsar Parhizgar

Joseph P Harmon

David James Miller

John Richard Wassum

John David Holt

A computer-automated system and method identify text in a first 'citing' court case, near a 'citing instance' (in which a second &#x201c;cited&#x201d; court case is cited), that indicates the reason(s) for citing (RFC). The automated method of designating text, taken from a set of citing documents, as reasons for citing (RFC) that are associated with respective citing instances of a cited document, has steps including: obtaining contexts of the citing instances in the respective citing documents (each context including text that includes the citing instance and text that is near the citing instance), analyzing the content of the contexts, and selecting (from the citing instances' context) text that constitutes the RFC, based on the analyzed content of the contexts. A related computer-automated system and method selects content words that are highly related to the reasons a particular document is cited, and gives them weights that indicate their relative relevance. Another related computer-automated system and method forms lists of morphological forms of words. Still another related computer-automated system and method scores sentences to show their relevance to the reasons a document is cited. Also, another related computer-automated system and method generates lists of content words. In a preferred embodiment, the systems and methods are applied to legal (especially case law) documents and legal (especially case law) citations.

Automated system and method for generating reasons that a court case is cited

A computer-implemented method of gathering large quantities of training data from case law documents (especially suitable for use as input to a learning algorithm that is used in a subsequent process of recognizing and distinguishing fact passages and discussion passages in additional case law documents) has steps of: partitioning text in the documents by headings in the documents, comparing the headings in the documents to fact headings in a fact heading list and to discussion headings in a discussion heading list, filtering from the documents the headings and text that is associated with the headings, and storing (on persistent storage in a manner adapted for input into the learning algorithm) fact training data and discussion training data that are based on the filtered headings and the associated text. Another method (of extracting features that are independent of specific machine learning algorithms needed to accurately classify case law text passages as fact passages or as discussion passages) has steps of: determining a relative position of the text passages in an opinion segment in the case law text, parsing the text passages into text chunks, comparing the text chunks to predetermined feature entities for possible matched feature entities, and associating the relative position and matched feature entities with the text passages for use by one of the learning algorithms. Corresponding apparatus and computer-readable memories are also provided.

System and method for identifying facts and legal discussion in court case law documents

A statistical thesaurus is built dynamically, from the same text collection that is being searched, allowing improved generation of expanded query terms. The thesaurus is dynamic in that thesaurus records are collected, ranked, accessed, and applied dynamically. Thesaurus 'records' are actually formed as indexed documents arranged in 'collections'. The collections are preferably distinguished based on text source (court cases versus news wires versus patents, and so forth). Each record has terms assembled in indexed groups (or segments) which inherently reflect a ranking based on relevance to an initial query. After an initial query is received, the appropriate collection(s) of records may be searched by a conventional search and retrieval engine, the searches inherently returning records ranked by degree of relevance due to the record indexing scheme. A record ranking scheme avoids contamination of relevant records by less relevant records. The record selection and the expansion query term generation processes are each divided into parallel threads. The separate threads correspond to respective text sources to enable the improved expansion query term generation to be provided in real time.

Statistical thesaurus, method of forming same, and use thereof in query

A phrase recognition method breaks streams of text into text 'chunks' and selects certain chunks as 'phrases' useful for automated full text searching. The phrase recognition method uses a carefully assembled list of partition elements to partition the text into the chunks, and selects phrases from the chunks according to a small number of frequency based definitions. The method can also incorporate additional processes such as categorization of proper names to enhance phrase recognition. The method selects phrases quickly and efficiently, referring simply to the phrases themselves and the frequency with which they are encountered, rather than relying on complex, time-consuming, resource-consuming grammatical analysis, or on collocation schemes of limited applicability, or on heuristical text analysis of limited reliability or utility.

Phrase recognition method and apparatus

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Springboro, OH, United States of America

Xin Allan Lu