Over the last years there has been a great increase on the number of freely available legal resources. Portals that allow users to search for legislation, using keywords are now a common place. However, in the vast majority of those portals, legal documents are not stored in a structured format with a rich set of meta data, but in presentation oriented manifestation, making impossible for the end users to inquiry semantics about the documents, such as date of enactment, date of repeal,...

LegalAve is a new public legal information website in Alberta, Canada. The project was initiated by public and law librarians to help deal with the gap in legal information delivery and access to justice in Alberta. The founding librarians recognized that while much legal information can be found freely on the internet, this increased access can mean trouble for many members of the public who are not discerning consumers of legal information. Information overload, confusion over...

The article discusses the program "The New Generation of Legal Research Databases: Eighteen Months Later" at the February 27-March 1, 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Committee on Relations With Information Vendors (CRIV) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The program speakers assessed the legal research database WestlawNext, especially in comparison to Westlaw Classic. Program speakers included librarians Jean P. O'Grady, Denise A. Pagh, and Lisa A. Spar.

In this research, we investigate a methodology to classify automatically Web queries by topic and user intent. Taking a 20,000 plus Web query data set sectioned by topic, we manually classified each query using a three-level hierarchy of user intent. We note that significant differences in user intent across topics. Results show that user intent (informational, navigational, and transactional) varies by topic (15 to 24 percent depending on the category). We then use this manually classified...

An overwhelming number of legal documents is available in digital form. However, most of the texts are usually only provided in a semi-structured form, i.e. the documents are structured only implicitly using text formatting and alignment. In this form the documents are perfectly understandable by a human, but not by a machine. This is an obstacle towards advanced intelligent legal information retrieval and knowledge systems. The reason for this lack of structured knowledge is that the...

"The aim of our research is the improvement of Boolean search with query expansion using lexical ontologies and user feedback. User studies strongly suggest that standard search techniques have to be improved in order to meet legal particularities. Query expansion can exploit the potential of linguistic knowledge and successful user behaviour. First tentative results show the feasibility of our approach. A first search prototype has been built and tested in the area of European state aid law."

The identification of the user’s intention or interest through queries that they submit to a search engine can be very useful to offer them more adequate results. In this work we present a framework for the identification of user’s interest in an automatic way, based on the analysis of query logs. This identification is made from two perspectives, the objectives or goals of a user and the categories in which these aims are situated. A manual classification of the queries was made in order to...

This paper describes a qualitative study of information-seeking behavior patterns of students at the Villanova University School of Law Farmworker Legal Aid Clinic. The interactions of law student researchers with legal information systems were observed, as well as the overall context of use of those systems. The purpose of this study is to develop a conceptual framework for legal information behavior. A strong conceptual framework can be used by librarians and system designers to develop improved legal information systems, services, and instruction.

In this poster, we present a method for extracting queries related to real-life events, or news-related queries, from large web query logs. The method employs query frequencies and search over a collection of recent news. News-related queries can be helpful for disambiguating user information needs, as well as for effective online news processing. The performed evaluation proves that the method yields good precision.

Automatically generated web search result categories were found to be beneficial in our previous study. In that study, we used 15 result categories and left the optimal number of categories issue deliberately untouched. To address this matter, we conducted a new experiment with 27 participants to compare search user interfaces with 10, 20, and 40 automatically generated categories. The results show that users prefer fewer categories. The use of fewer categories results in a slightly more...

Previous work on understanding user web search behavior has focused on how people search and what they are searching for, but not why they are searching. In this paper, we describe a framework for understanding the underlying goals of user searches, and our experience in using the framework to manually classify queries from a web search engine. Our analysis suggests that so-called navigational" searches are less prevalent than generally believed while a previously unexplored...

Although interactive query reformulation has been actively studied in the laboratory, little is known about the actual behavior of web searchers who are offered terminological feedback along with their search results. We analyze log sessions for two groups of users interacting with variants of the AltaVista search engine - a baseline group given no terminological feedback and a feedback group to whom twelve refinement terms are offered along with the search results. We examine uptake,...

The paper examines the way in which classification schemes can be applied to the organization of digital resources. The case is argued for the particular suitability of schemes  based on faceted principles for the organization of complex digital objects. Details are given of a co-operative project between the School of Library Archive & Information Studies, University College London, and the United Kingdom Higher Education gateways Arts and Humanities Data Service and Humbul, in which a...

The paper looks at ways in which traditional classification and indexing tools have dealt with the relationship between constituent terms ; variations in these are examined and compared with the methods used in machine searching, particularly of the Internet and World Wide Web. Apparent correspondences with features of index languages are identified, and further methods of applying classification and indexing theory to machine retrieval are proposed.

This paper explores the use of hierarchical structure for classifying a large, heterogeneous collection of web content. The hierarchical structure is initially used to train different second-level classifiers. In the hierarchical case, a model is learned to distinguish a second-level category from other categories within the same top level. In the flat non-hierarchical case, a model distinguishes a second-level category from all other second-level categories. Scoring rules can further take...

We describe in this paper a boolean Information Retrieval system that adds word semantics to the classic word based indexing. Two of the main tasks of our system, namely the indexing and retrieval components, are using a combined word-based and sense-based approach. The key to our system is a methodology for building semantic representations of open text, at word and collocation level. This new technique, called semantic indexing, shows improved effectiveness over the classic word based indexing techniques.

In database or knowledge-base systems, query formulation languages are the means offered to users for accessing data or knowledge. Queries allow selection of data under particular, either simple or complex constraints, resulting from one or several structures. However, query formulation remains obstinately difficult for large classes of users. Indeed, with the exception of approaches facilitating syntax problems, there is a noticeable absence of models taking charge of the user through...