Conceptual search – ESI, litigation and the issue of language

Across the globe, legal, business and technical practitioners charged with managing information are continually challenged by rapid-fire evolution and growth in the legal and technology fields. In the United States, new compliance requirements, amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and corresponding case law, along with technical advances, have made litigation support one of the most exciting professions in the legal arena. In the UK, revisions to the Practice Direction to CPR Rule 31 require parties in civil litigation to consider the impacts associated with electronic documents. One emerging technology trends—both aiding and complicating the management of electronically stored information (ESI) in litigation in the US, EU and UK alike—is the notion of “conceptual search.” This paper focuses on the evolution of conceptual search technology, and predictions of where this science will take legal professionals and technical information managers in coming years and a look at the advantages conceptual search can provide in dealing with the issue of language. This paper will focus primarily and the latent semantic analysis approach to conceptual search and why this approach is advantageous when searching ESI regardless of the language used in the documents, even to the extent of allowing for cross language searching and accurate searching of documents that contain co-mingle foreign terms with the native language

Legal Information and the Development of American Law: Writings on the Form and Structure of the Published Law

Robert C. Berring\u27s writings about the impacts of electronic databases, the Internet, and other communications technologies on legal research and practice are an essential part of a larger literature that explores the ways in which the forms and structures of published legal information have influenced how American lawyers think about the law. This paper reviews Berring\u27s writings, along with those of other writers concerned with these questions, focusing on the implications of Berring\u27s idea that in the late nineteenth century American legal publishers created a conceptual universe of thinkable thoughts through which U.S. lawyers came to view the law. It concludes that, spurred by Berring and others, the literature of legal information has become far reaching in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, while the themes struck in Berring\u27s work continue to inform the scholarship of newer writers

Modeling social information skills

In a modern economy, the most important resource consists in\ud human talent: competent, knowledgeable people. Locating the right person for\ud the task is often a prerequisite to complex problem-solving, and experienced\ud professionals possess the social skills required to find appropriate human\ud expertise. These skills can be reproduced more and more with specific\ud computer software, an approach defining the new field of social information\ud retrieval. We will analyze the social skills involved and show how to model\ud them on computer. Current methods will be described, notably information\ud retrieval techniques and social network theory. A generic architecture and its\ud functions will be outlined and compared with recent work. We will try in this\ud way to estimate the perspectives of this recent domain

Science Models as Value-Added Services for Scholarly Information Systems

The paper introduces scholarly Information Retrieval (IR) as a further dimension that should be considered in the science modeling debate. The IR use case is seen as a validation model of the adequacy of science models in representing and predicting structure and dynamics in science. Particular conceptualizations of scholarly activity and structures in science are used as value-added search services to improve retrieval quality: a co-word model depicting the cognitive structure of a field (used for query expansion), the Bradford law of information concentration, and a model of co-authorship networks (both used for re-ranking search results). An evaluation of the retrieval quality when science model driven services are used turned out that the models proposed actually provide beneficial effects to retrieval quality. From an IR perspective, the models studied are therefore verified as expressive conceptualizations of central phenomena in science. Thus, it could be shown that the IR perspective can significantly contribute to a better understanding of scholarly structures and activities.Comment: 26 pages, to appear in Scientometric

Applying Science Models for Search

The paper proposes three different kinds of science models as value-added services that are integrated in the retrieval process to enhance retrieval quality. The paper discusses the approaches Search Term Recommendation, Bradfordizing and Author Centrality on a general level and addresses implementation issues of the models within a real-life retrieval environment.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, ISI 201

Factory of realities: on the emergence of virtual spatiotemporal structures

The ubiquitous nature of modern Information Retrieval and Virtual World give rise to new realities. To what extent are these "realities" real? Which "physics" should be applied to quantitatively describe them? In this essay I dwell on few examples. The first is Adaptive neural networks, which are not networks and not neural, but still provide service similar to classical ANNs in extended fashion. The second is the emergence of objects looking like Einsteinian spacetime, which describe the behavior of an Internet surfer like geodesic motion. The third is the demonstration of nonclassical and even stronger-than-quantum probabilities in Information Retrieval, their use. Immense operable datasets provide new operationalistic environments, which become to greater and greater extent "realities". In this essay, I consider the overall Information Retrieval process as an objective physical process, representing it according to Melucci metaphor in terms of physical-like experiments. Various semantic environments are treated as analogs of various realities. The readers' attention is drawn to topos approach to physical theories, which provides a natural conceptual and technical framework to cope with the new emerging realities.Comment: 21 p

What do we need to add to a social network to get a society? answer: something like what we have to add to a spatial network to get a city

Recent years have seen great advances in social network analysis. Yet, with a few exceptions, the field of network analysis remains remote from social theory. As a result, much social network research, while technically accomplished and theoretically suggestive, is essentially descriptive. How then can social networks be linked to social theory ? Here we pose the question in its simplest form: what must we add to a social network to get a society ? We begin by showing that one reason for the disconnection between network theory and society theory is that because it exists in spacetime, the concept of social network raises the issue of space in a way that is problematical for social theory. Here we turn the problem on its head and make the problem of space in social network theory explicit by proposing a surprising analogy with the question: what do you have to add to an urban space network to get a city. We show first that by treating a city as a naïve spatial network in the first instance and allowing it to acquire two formal properties we call reflexivity and nonlocality, both mediated through a mechanism we call description retrieval, we can build a picture of the dynamics processes by which collections of the buildings become living cities. We then show that by describing societies initially as social networks in space-time and adding similar properties, we can construct a plausible ontology of a simple human society