Discussion of terms and how they are used in queries in information retrieval focuses on a transaction log analysis of queries posed on an Internet search service that isolated basic query structure syntactic patterns. Describes a linguistic model that classified Web queries and suggests implications for information retrieval system design. (Contains 9 references.) (Author/LRW)

Our research focuses on designing effective search aids for legal researchers interested in law-related information on the world wide web. In this paper we report on the design and evaluation of two software systems developed to explore models for browsing and searching across a user-selected set of WWW sites. A directory services tool, LIBClient, provides a hierarchical index of legal information resources in an interface emphasizing ease-of-use by Internet novices and management of...

We analyzed transaction logs containing 51,473 queries posed by 18,113 users of Excite, a major Internet search service. We provide data on: (i) sessions — changes in queries during a session, number of pages viewed, and use of relevance feedback; (ii) queries — the number of search terms, and the use of logic and modifiers; and (iii) terms — their rank/frequency distribution and the most highly used search terms. We then shift the focus of analysis from the query to the user to gain insight...

Queries submitted to the Excite search engine were analyzed for subject content based on the cooccurrence of terms within multiterm queries. More than 1000 of the most frequently cooccurring term pairs were categorized into one or more of 30 developed subject areas. Subject area frequencies and their cooccurrences with one another were tallied and analyzed using hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling. The cluster analyses revealed several anticipated and a few...

Cet extrait compare le rôle de la logique et de l'expérience dans la common law. Notamment, en expliquant l'aversion des juges de common law pour la ''strict logic''.

English Private Law is presented in two volumes which break on the line between property and obligations. Beyond obligations lies the law of actions, and before property comes the law of persons. Before persons comes Part I, whose single chapter deals with the sources of law. Hence there are five Parts in ail. They are not randomly selected, and they are not ordered by the alphabet. The principal task of this introduction is ta explain the structural scheme which relates these five Parts one...

L'alliance du droit et de la science informatique n'est pas récente. Préfigurée dans les recherches logiques sur le droit, elle s'est développée avec la naissance de la cybernétique. Puis l'informatique s'est intéressée aux opérations de mémorisation de l'information juridique: les grandes banques de données sont devenues les bibliothèques quotidiennes du juriste. La dernière étape, la nôtre, est celle de l'intelligence artificielle c'est-à-dire d'une informatique qui formalise des...

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.

Basic skills of classification and subject indexing lhavc been little taught in British library schools since automation was introduced into libraries. However, development of the Internet as a major mcdium of publication has stretched the capacity of search engines to cope with rctrieval. Consequently, there has been interest in applying existing systems of knowledge organization to clcctronic resources. Unfortunately, the classification systems havc been adopted without a full...

The paper presents the results of a pilot study of 15 lawyers at various stages of their career. We examine novice lawyers at the beginning of their career and compare their concepts of task, information and information seeking with the concepts of task, information and information seeking of expert lawyers who have practiced law for more than 7 years. We observed that while novice lawyers have separate problem recognition and solution structures, for expert lawyers these structures are...

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...

L'extrait explique le rôle des juges et des juristes dans le développement de la common law avec une perspective historique.

To put it mildly, use of the Internet for legal research has proliferated. In addition, many reference librarians who wish to supplement LEXIS-NEXIS, CIS Academic Universe, Westlaw, and other commercial legal resources are turning to freely-available Web-based legal resources for the sake of comprehensiveness and cost savings. With this as background, the Idaho State University Reference Division staff surveyed the significant and freely available legal sites on the Web. They used Academic...

L’approche courante de West consiste à extraire des titres dans les jugements et à leur attribuer une cote selon un plan de classification. La seule manière de retrouver ce titre est cependant par mot-clé, ce qui rend la recherche approximative (p. 191-192), d'oû l'intérêt de nouvelles méthodes. West manipule l'entrée de plusieurs centaines de cas par jour, et chaque jugement publié doit passer par un rédacteur qui écrit le synopsis et les titres, et un analyste (un " c1assifieur ") qui...

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.

Automatic Indexing and Abstracting of Document Texts summarizes the latest techniques of automatic indexing and abstracting, and the results of their application. It also places the techniques in the context of the study of text, manual indexing and abstracting, and the use of the indexing descriptions and abstracts in systems that select documents or information from large collections. Important sections of the book consider the development of new techniques for indexing and abstracting....

Dans ce travail nous proposons un système permettant de construire et de maintenir le contexte des interactions dans une interface web, pour des bases de données juridiques. Nous utilisons certains résultats du projet AustLIl (Australasian Lega Information Institute), un système d'inférence via le World Wide Web pour des bases de données juridiques. En particulier, nous nous servons de SINO, un moteur de recherche pour bases de données juridique (Greenleaf, Mowbray and King 1997)....

When invited by counsel in the 1947 case of Read v. J. Lyons & Co' to rationalise the law of tort, Lord Macmillan's response was to say that it was not the House of Lords' "task to rationalise the law of England" since arguments "based on legal consistency are apt to mislead for the common law is a practical code adapted to deal with the manifold diversities of human life, and as a great American judge [Holmes] has reminded us, 'the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience'...