Toward Linking Heterogenous References in Czech Court Decisions to Content

In this paper we present initial results from our effort to automatically detect references in decisions of the courts in the Czech Republic and link these references to their content. We focus on references to case-law and legal literature. To deal with wide variety in how references are expressed we use a novel distributed approach to reference recognition. Instead of attempting to recognize the references as a whole we focus on their lower level constituents. We assembled a corpus of 350 decisions and annotated it with more than 50,000 annotations corresponding to different reference constituents. Here we present our first attempt to detect these constituents automaticall

Možnosti citační analýzy v České republice

Předkládaná studie je prvním výstupem dlouhodobého výzkumu teoretických a praktických možností provedení citační analýzy judikatury v České republice. Vypracování takové analýzy je prvním krokem k vytvoření praktických nástrojů, které přesně dokáží mapovat vztahy mezi jednotlivými rozhodnutími a tím hodnotit jejich důležitost. V úvodní části textu je nabídnuto teoretické shrnutí dosavadních poznatků ve zkoumané oblasti, rešerše relevantní literatury a stručné zhodnocení využitelnosti citační analýzy v českém prostředí. Druhá část shrnuje aktuální status quo práce s judikaturou v České republice. Nejprve se zaměřuje na veřejně dostupné databáze vrcholných soudů (Nejvyšší soud, Nejvyšší správní soud a Ústavní soud), přičemž jsou zkoumány možnosti, které dané databázové systémy nabízejí, tedy zda a případně jakým způsobem jsou metadaty určeny vztahy k citovaným rozhodnutím. Obdobný postup je pak proveden v rámci tří komerčních právních informačních systémů – ASPI, Beck-online a CODEXIS. Třetí část shrnuje prvotní problémy ležící v cestě provedení komplexní citační analýzy, která by splňovala požadavky využitelnosti. Popisuje první krok, spočívající v pokusu o zachycení citací soudních rozhodnutí regulárním výrazem ve vzorku 46 rozhodnutí Ústavního soudu. V závěru textu jsou pak zhodnoceny dosažené výsledky a je popsán další postup výzkumu možností realizace citační analýzy judikatury v České republice.This paper is the first output of long-term research on theoretical and practical possibility of citation analysis of the case law in the Czech Republic. Development of such an analysis is the first step in the creation of practical tools that can accurately map relationships between specific decisions and thus evaluate their importance. In the first part of the paper a general summary of current findings in the area, a recherché of relevant doctrinal sources and brief evaluation of the applicability of citation analysis in the Czech environment is offered. In the second part of the paper the current status quo of the case law publication practice in the Czech Republic is summed up. Firstly, publicly accessible databases of the supreme courts (Supreme Court, Supreme Administrative Court, and Constitutional Court) are reviewed. The possibilities which these database systems offer are examined, e.g. whether and how the relationships between different decisions by their metadata are specified. A similar approach is consequently applied to the three private legal information systems - ASPI, Beckonline, and CODEXIS. In the third part of the paper primary difficulties that stand in the way of conducting the complex citation analysis which would meet the requirements of usability are summed up. The first step consisting in an attempt to capture citations of decisions in the sample of 46 decisions of the Constitutional Court by a regular expression is described. At the end of the paper, results are evaluated, and further approach of the research of the possibility of case law citation analysis is described

On the concept of relevance in legal information retrieval

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

Data Sciences Technology for Homeland Security Information Management and Knowledge Discovery

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has vast amounts of data available, but its ultimate value cannot be realized without powerful technologies for knowledge discovery to enable better decision making by analysts. Past evidence has shown that terrorist activities leave detectable footprints, but these footprints generally have not been discovered until the opportunity for maximum benefit has passed. The challenge faced by the DHS is to discover the money transfers, border crossings, and other activities in advance of an attack and use that information to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities. The data to be analyzed by DHS comes from many sources ranging from news feeds, to raw sensors, to intelligence reports, and more. The amount of data is staggering; some estimates place the number of entities to be processed at 1015. The uses for the data are varied as well, including entity tracking over space and time, identifying complex and evolving relationships between entities, and identifying organization structure, to name a few. Because they are ideal for representing relationship and linkage information, semantic graphs have emerged as a key technology for fusing and organizing DHS data. A semantic graph organizes relational data by using nodes to represent entities and edges to connect related entities. Hidden relationships in the data are then uncovered by examining the structure and properties of the semantic graph

Legal Knowledge and Information Systems - JURIX 2017: The Thirtieth Annual Conference

The proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems – JURIX 2017. For three decades, the JURIX conferences have been held under the auspices of the Dutch Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (www.jurix.nl). In the time, it has become a European conference in terms of the diverse venues throughout Europe and the nationalities of participants

B!SON: A Tool for Open Access Journal Recommendation

Finding a suitable open access journal to publish scientific work is a complex task: Researchers have to navigate a constantly growing number of journals, institutional agreements with publishers, funders’ conditions and the risk of Predatory Publishers. To help with these challenges, we introduce a web-based journal recommendation system called B!SON. It is developed based on a systematic requirements analysis, built on open data, gives publisher-independent recommendations and works across domains. It suggests open access journals based on title, abstract and references provided by the user. The recommendation quality has been evaluated using a large test set of 10,000 articles. Development by two German scientific libraries ensures the longevity of the project